THE STRIKINGLY SIMILAR RELATION BETWEEN SATELLITE AND CENTRAL GALAXIES AND THEIR DARK MATTER HALOS SINCE z = 2

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal Vol. 772; no. 2; pp. 139 - 12
• Main Authors: Watson, Douglas F., Conroy, Charlie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.08.2013
• Subjects: ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY; CORRELATION FUNCTIONS; COSMOLOGY; Dark matter; Evolution; GALACTIC EVOLUTION; Galactic halos; GALAXIES; LIFETIME; NONLUMINOUS MATTER; RED SHIFT; Satellites; Similarity; Stellar mass
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/772/2/139

Satellite galaxies in rich clusters are subject to numerous physical processes that can significantly influence their evolution. To investigate the extent to which satellite and central galaxy evolution differs, we separately model the stellar mass-halo mass (M sub(*)-M sub(h)) relation for these two populations over the redshift interval 0 < z < 1. Our approach does not rely on the abundance matching technique but instead adopts a flexible functional form for the relation between satellite galaxy stellar mass and subhalo mass, where subhalo mass is considered as the maximum mass that a subhalo has ever reached in its merger history, M sub(peak). We speculate that the striking similarity between the satellite and central galaxy M sub(*)-M sub(h) relations since z ~ 2 arises because the central galaxy relation evolves very weakly with time and because the stellar mass of the typical satellite galaxy has not changed significantly since it was accreted.