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Main Authors: Wang, Yikun, Zehavi, Idit, Contreras, Sergio, Cole, Shaun, Norberg, Peder
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13204
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author Wang, Yikun
Zehavi, Idit
Contreras, Sergio
Cole, Shaun
Norberg, Peder
author_facet Wang, Yikun
Zehavi, Idit
Contreras, Sergio
Cole, Shaun
Norberg, Peder
contents Assembly bias is the variation in the clustering of dark matter halos and galaxies that arises from correlations between the halo assembly history and the large-scale environment at fixed halo mass. In this work, we use the cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulation TNG300 to investigate how assembly bias affects the environment-dependent galaxy luminosity function. We measure the luminosity functions in bins of large-scale environment for the original simulated galaxy sample and for a shuffled sample, where the galaxies are randomly reassigned among halos of similar mass to remove assembly bias. By comparing them, we find distinct signatures, showing variations in the number of galaxies at the $\sim10\%$ level across all luminosities. Assembly bias increases the tendency of galaxies to reside in denser environments and further dilutes underdense regions, beyond the trends governed by halo mass. When separating by color, we see that assembly bias has a much bigger effect on red galaxies fainter than $\mathrm{M_r} - 5 \log{h} = -18.5$, which accounts for a $\sim20\%$ increase in the number of galaxies in the densest environment and a remarkable $50\%$ decrease in the least dense regions. The ratio of these measurements for the densest and least dense regions provides a significant assembly bias signal for the faint red galaxies, larger than a factor of two. Overall, our results provide a novel sensitive measure of assembly bias, offering valuable insight for modeling the effect and a potential new route to detect it in observations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_13204
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A New Measure of Assembly Bias using the Environment Dependence of the Luminosity Function
Wang, Yikun
Zehavi, Idit
Contreras, Sergio
Cole, Shaun
Norberg, Peder
Astrophysics of Galaxies
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
Assembly bias is the variation in the clustering of dark matter halos and galaxies that arises from correlations between the halo assembly history and the large-scale environment at fixed halo mass. In this work, we use the cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulation TNG300 to investigate how assembly bias affects the environment-dependent galaxy luminosity function. We measure the luminosity functions in bins of large-scale environment for the original simulated galaxy sample and for a shuffled sample, where the galaxies are randomly reassigned among halos of similar mass to remove assembly bias. By comparing them, we find distinct signatures, showing variations in the number of galaxies at the $\sim10\%$ level across all luminosities. Assembly bias increases the tendency of galaxies to reside in denser environments and further dilutes underdense regions, beyond the trends governed by halo mass. When separating by color, we see that assembly bias has a much bigger effect on red galaxies fainter than $\mathrm{M_r} - 5 \log{h} = -18.5$, which accounts for a $\sim20\%$ increase in the number of galaxies in the densest environment and a remarkable $50\%$ decrease in the least dense regions. The ratio of these measurements for the densest and least dense regions provides a significant assembly bias signal for the faint red galaxies, larger than a factor of two. Overall, our results provide a novel sensitive measure of assembly bias, offering valuable insight for modeling the effect and a potential new route to detect it in observations.
title A New Measure of Assembly Bias using the Environment Dependence of the Luminosity Function
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13204