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Anisotropic satellite galaxy quenching modulated by black hole activity

Abstract

The evolution of satellite galaxies is shaped by their constant interaction with the circumgalactic medium surrounding central galaxies, which in turn may be affected by gas and energy ejected from the central supermassive black hole1,2,3,4,5,6. The nature of such a coupling between black holes and galaxies is, however, much debated7,8,9 and observational evidence remains scarce10,11. Here we report an analysis of archival data on 124,163 satellite galaxies in the potential wells of 29,631 dark matter halos with masses between 1012 and 1014 solar masses. We find that quenched satellite galaxies are relatively less frequent along the minor axis of their central galaxies. This observation might appear counterintuitive given that black hole activity is expected to eject mass and energy preferentially in the direction of the minor axis of the host galaxy. We show, however, that the observed anisotropic signal results precisely from the ejective nature of black hole feedback in massive halos, as outflows powered by active galactic nuclei clear out the circumgalactic medium, reducing the ram pressure and thus preserving star formation in satellite galaxies. This interpretation is supported by the IllustrisTNG suite of cosmological numerical simulations, even though the model’s sub-grid implementation of black hole feedback is effectively isotropic12.

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Fig. 1: Orientation of satellite galaxies around central galaxies.
Fig. 2: Anisotropic distribution of quiescent satellite galaxies in SDSS.
Fig. 3: SDSS versus IllustrisTNG.
Fig. 4: Anisotropic CGM density in IllustrisTNG.

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Data availability

All data used in this work are publicly available through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Illustris and IllustrisTNG public data releases.

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Acknowledgements

I.M.-N. acknowledges support from grant PID2019-107427GB-C32 from The Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual SPanD Fellowship 702607. A.P. and M.D. acknowledge support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 138713538 – SFB 881 (“The Milky Way System”), subproject A01. We thank G. Pérez Díaz for helping with the design of the figures.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

I.M.-N. and A.P. developed the original idea and characterized the signal in the observed and simulated data. D.N. measured the gas mass density distribution in IllustrisTNG and contributed to the early developement of the project. V.R.-G. generated the synthetic SDSS-like images based on IllustrisTNG data, and M.D. provided the information about the infalling time of satellites in IllustrisTNG. L.H. and V.S. contributed to the analysis and interpretation of the observed and simulated data. I.M.-N. and A.P. wrote the text, and all the co-authors contributed to refining and polishing the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ignacio Martín-Navarro.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature thanks Claudia Cicone and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 SDSS posterior distributions for the best-fitting description of the angular modulation of satellite quiescence.

We fit the observed data with a cosine function with three free parameters, the average quiescent fraction fq, the amplitude of the modulation, and a re-scaling term for the expected error f. Posteriors are well behaved and allowed us to reject the null-hypothesis at a ~6σ level. Blue solid vertical lines indicate the best-fitting values and the dashed lines indicate the 1σ confidence interval.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Sensitivity of the SDSS signal to PA uncertainties.

a, The fraction of SDSS quiescent galaxies as a function of the orientation based on the worst-fitting functional form (de Vaucouleurs versus exponential) according to the SDSS photometric pipeline. The stability of the signal demonstrates that our results are robust against the photometric fitting procedure. Error bars represent the best-fitting standard deviation, as described in the Methods. b, Coloured curves indicate the best-fitting solution for SDSS data obtained while randomly perturbating the PA of the central galaxy by ΔPA. For reference, black symbols and curves are the same as in Fig. 2. A clear modulation in the fraction of quiescent galaxies is observed even for ΔPA ≈ 30, which is an order of magnitude larger than the expected error on the individual PAs. c, d, The SDSS g-band images of galaxies best-fitted by a de Vaucouleurs (top row) and an exponential profile (bottom row), with the PA uncertainty indicated by the white-shaded area. The adopted PA is indicated in the top left corner of each image.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Test with randomized PAs.

a, The fraction of quiescent satellites in SDSS data after randomizing the PA of the central galaxies. As expected, no signal is recovered in this case. Error bars represent the best-fitting standard deviation, as described in the Methods. b, The posterior distributions for this test, where the modelled amplitude is consistent with no angular variation. Blue solid vertical lines indicate the best-fitting values and the dashed lines indicate the 1σ confidence interval.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Characterization of the SDSS signal.

a, We show that the modulation in the observed signal is higher for satellites closer to the centre (Rsat < 0.5Rvir, orange symbols) than for those satellites in the outskirts (Rsat < 0.5Rvir, blue symbols). b, The signal is stronger for halos with more massive central galaxies (logMcen > 11M, orange symbols) compared to the signal observed in halos with less massive central galaxies (logMcen < 11M, blue symbols). c, Less massive satellites (logMsat < 10.5M, orange symbols) exhibit a larger variation than more massive ones (logMsat > 10.5M, blue symbols). d, The signal is also stronger in halos hosting more massive black holes in their centre (orange symbols), compared to those with relatively less-massive central black holes (blue symbols) Panels eh are equivalent to panels ad but without removing the offset between the different sub-samples.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Alternative metrics for the characterization of SDSS satellites’ star-formation status.

a, b, The modulation observed in the average specific SFR (a) and distance from the star-formation main sequence (b) of SDSS satellites closely follows that shown by the fraction of quiescent satellites in Fig. 2. Regardless of the metric used to characterize the star-formation properties of satellite galaxies, there is a clear dependence on the orientation with respect to the central galaxy. Error bars indicate the 1σ uncertainty and yellow lines mark the location of the minor and major axes.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Additional trends with halo mass and distance in SDSS.

As in Fig. 2, black symbols represent the observed modulation on the SDSS data. The blue line indicates the change in the quiescent fraction that could be expected because of the average halo mass dependence on orientation, which is much smaller than the reported one. Similarly, satellites along the minor axis are marginally closer to the central galaxy than along the major axis, leading to a negative and even weaker modulation, as shown by the red line. Error bars represent the best-fitting standard deviation, as described in the Methods.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Iso-quiescent fraction contours.

Similarly to Fig. 4, the contours of constant fq are shown, but this time at three different levels: fq = {0.36, 0.42, 0.48}. The background image corresponds to the IllustrisTNG gas over-density and the typical virial radius in the explored halo mass range is shown as a dashed grey circle, as in Fig. 4.

Extended Data Fig. 8 IllustrisTNG versus Illustris comparison.

Modulation in the fraction of quiescent galaxies for the IllustrisTNG (namely, TNG100, red symbols) and the original Illustris (blue symbols) simulations. Error bars represent the best-fitting standard deviation, as described in the Methods. The signal is shown in green for a sample of IllustrisTNG satellites with the same mass distribution as those in Illustris, to assess the possible effect of a mass bias between the two simulations. Both simulations probe a similar ~100-Mpc comoving cosmological volume and thus share the same large-scale structure properties; the treatment of black hole growth and feedback is the most relevant difference between the two. However, it is clear that the amplitude of the modulation is much higher in IllustrisTNG (0.032 ± 0.004) than in Illustris (0.013 ± 0.007).

Extended Data Fig. 9 Quiescent versus star-forming central galaxies in IllustrisTNG and SDSS.

In a, at a fixed central stellar mass of ~logMcen = 10.5M, the modulation in the fraction of quiescent satellites in TNG100 is shown for star-forming (blue) and quiescent (orange) central galaxies. Although there are a limited number of satellites, the modulation in the signal appears to be stronger for quiescent central galaxies than for star-forming ones. Since quiescentness in IllustrisTNG is a strong indication of an effective black hole feedback, the fact that the signal is stronger for quiescent galaxies is also an indication of the proposed AGN-related origin for the observed quenching directionality. The modulation in the fraction of quiescent satellites is shown for star-forming (blue) and quiescent (orange) central galaxies in b but this time for SDSS galaxies, again of logMcen = 10.5M. The observed modulation is stronger for quiescent than for star-forming central galaxies as seen in IllustrisTNG. Solid lines and shaded areas indicate the best-fitting trends and 1σ confidence interval, respectively. Error bars represent the best-fitting standard deviation, as described in the Methods.

Extended Data Fig. 10 Dependencies of the signal in IllustrisTNG.

a, The fraction of quiescent satellites around central galaxies whose black holes have injected, relatively to their mass, more (red) and less (blue) total energy. b, Similarly, the same separation but in this case considering only the kinetic energy injected by the black holes. In both cases, the amplitude of the modulation is stronger when the total (a) and kinetic (b) energy released by the central black holes increase. Similar to Extended Data Fig. 4, panel c shows how the signal in IllustrisTNG depends on the relative mass of the central black hole, being stronger for more over-massive black hole galaxies. d, The observed signal in IllustrisTNG (red) and the de-projected signal (blue) using the underlying 3D satellite distribution. We note that in d we did not impose any cut in central stellar mass and therefore absolute values are different from the other panels. Error bars and shaded areas represent 1σ confidence intervals, and solid lines are the best-fitting solutions.

Extended Data Fig. 11 Quenching directionality in IllustrisTNG.

a, The number of TNG100 satellites in each orientation bin, depending on whether they are star-forming (blue symbols), quenched in their z ≈ 0 host halo (green), were pre-processed and quenched in a different halo (orange), or quenched as central galaxies (red). The last two groups (red and orange symbols) are sensitive to large-scale structure effects, but correspond only to a small fraction of the total satellite population. b, The fraction of quiescent satellites as a function of orientation is shown but only for those satellites that quenched in their z ≈ 0 host halo (green symbols). The amplitude of this modulation mimics that measured for all IllustrisTNG satellites (grey-shaded area and black line).

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Martín-Navarro, I., Pillepich, A., Nelson, D. et al. Anisotropic satellite galaxy quenching modulated by black hole activity. Nature 594, 187–190 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03545-9

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