The building up of observed stellar scaling relations of massive galaxies and the connection to black hole growth in the TNG50 silation

S. Vaa, M. Huertas-Company, A. Pillepich, D. Nelson, V. Rodriguez-Gomez, A. Dekel, S. M. Faber, P. Iglesias-Navarro, D. C. Koo, J. Primack

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study how mock-observed stellar morphological and structural properties of massive galaxies are built up between $z$ = 0.5 and $z$ = 3 in the TNG50 cosmological silation. We generate mock images with the properties of the CANDELS survey and derive Sersic parameters and optical rest-frame morphologies as usually done in the observations. Overall, the silation reproduces the observed evolution of the abundances of different galaxy morphological types of star-foing and quiescent galaxies. The log M - log Re and log M - log 1 relations of the silated star-foing and quenched galaxies also match the observed slopes and zeropoints to within 1. In the silation, galaxies increase their observed central stellar mass density (1) and transfo in morphology from irregular/clumpy systems to noal Hubble-type systems in the star foation main sequence at a characteristic stellar mass of 1010.5 M which is reflected in an increase of the central stellar mass density (1). This morphological transfoation is connected to the activity of the central super massive black holes (SMBHs). At low stellar masses (109 < M/M < 1010) SMBHs grow rapidly, while at higher mass SMBHs switch into the kinetic feedback mode and grow more slowly. During this low-accretion phase, SMBH feedback leads to the quenching of star-foation, along with a siltaneous growth in 1, partly due to the fading of stellar populations. More compact massive galaxies grow their SMBHs faster than extended ones of the same mass and end up quenching earlier. In the TNG50 silation, SMBHs predominantly grow via gas accretion before galaxies quench, and 1 increases substantially after SMBH growth slows down. The silation predicts therefore that quiescent galaxies have higher 1 values than star-foing galaxies for the same SMBH mass, which disagrees with alternative models, and may potentially be in tension with some observations.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2654-2673
Number of pages20
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume509
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.

Keywords

  • evolution
  • foation
  • galaxies
  • galaxies
  • galaxies
  • high-redshift

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The building up of observed stellar scaling relations of massive galaxies and the connection to black hole growth in the TNG50 silation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this