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The origin of galaxy colour bimodality in the scatter of the stellar-to-halo mass relation

Nature Astronomy volume 5, pages 1069–1076 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 28 July 2021

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Abstract

Recent observations reveal that, at a given stellar mass, blue galaxies tend to live in haloes with lower mass, while red galaxies live in more massive host haloes. The physical driver behind this is still unclear because theoretical models predict that, at the same halo mass, galaxies with high stellar masses tend to live in early-formed haloes, which naively leads to the opposite trend. Here, we show that the Simba simulation quantitatively reproduces the colour bimodality in the stellar-to-halo mass relation and reveals an inverse relationship between halo formation time and galaxy transition time. It suggests that the origin of this bimodality is rooted in the intrinsic variations of the cold gas content due to halo assembly bias. Simba’s stellar-to-halo mass bimodality quantitatively relies on two aspects of its input physics: (1) jet-mode feedback from active galactic nuclei, which quenches galaxies and sets the qualitative trend, and (2) X-ray feedback from active galactic nuclei, which fully quenches galaxies and yields better agreement with observations. The interplay between the growth of cold gas and the quenching from active galactic nuclei in Simba results in the observed stellar-to-halo mass bimodality.

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Fig. 1: The SHMR at z = 0 from the Simba simulation, separated into red and blue galaxies, compared to observational results.
Fig. 2: The SHMR from the Simba simulation.
Fig. 3: The evolution track of the SHMR.
Fig. 4: The evolution of the gas fraction.
Fig. 5: The correlation between galaxy transition time with crossing time and AGN jet-on time.
Fig. 6: The SHMR of three simulations with different baryon models.

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Data availability

The Simba simulation snapshots with Caesar halo and galaxy catalogues are publicly available at http://simba.roe.ac.uk/. The processed source data for producing the figures in this paper are available at the author’s repository: https://bitbucket.org/WeiguangCui/ms-mhalo-scatter/src/master/.

Code availability

The Simba simulation is run with a private version of Gizmo, which is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. The galaxy catalogue of the Simba simulation is produced by Caesar, which is publicly available at https://github.com/dnarayanan/caesar. The detailed analysis pipeline scripts are available in the author’s repository: https://bitbucket.org/WeiguangCui/ms-mhalo-scatter/src/master/.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge helpful discussions with M. van Daalen, J. Matthee, K. Kraljic, D. Sorini, N. Thomas and Y. Zu. We thank R. Thompson for developing Caesar, and the yt team for development and support of yt. W.C. acknowledges the support from the China Manned Space Program through its Space Application System. W.C. and J.A.P. acknowledge support from the European Research Council under grant No. 670193 (the COSFORM project). R.D. acknowledges support from the Wolfson Research Merit Award programme of the UK Royal Society. W.C. and R.D. acknowledge support from the STFC AGP Grant ST/V000594/1. D.A.-A. acknowledges support by NSF grant AST-2009687 and by the Flatiron Institute, which is supported by the Simons Foundation. X.Y. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation of China (grant Nos. 11833005, 11890692 and 11621303). This work used the DiRAC@Durham facility managed by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility. The equipment was funded by BEIS capital funding via STFC capital grants ST/P002293/1, ST/R002371/1 and ST/S002502/1, Durham University and STFC operations grant ST/R000832/1. DiRAC is part of the National e-Infrastructure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Weiguang Cui, Romeel Davé & John A. Peacock

  2. Department of Astronomy, School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Weiguang Cui & Xiaohu Yang

  3. Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

    Daniel Anglés-Alcázar

  4. Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Daniel Anglés-Alcázar

  5. Shanghai Key Laboratory for Particle Physics and Cosmology, Shanghai, China

    Xiaohu Yang

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Contributions

W.C. conceived the project. R.D. performed the simulation with contributions from D.A.-A. and provided the Caesar catalogue. W.C. designed and performed the analysis. W.C., R.D., J.A.P, D.A.-A. and X.Y. interpreted the results. W.C. wrote the manuscript with contributions from R.D., J.A.P, D.A.-A. and X.Y.

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Correspondence to Weiguang Cui.

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Cui, W., Davé, R., Peacock, J.A. et al. The origin of galaxy colour bimodality in the scatter of the stellar-to-halo mass relation. Nat Astron 5, 1069–1076 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01404-1

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