Sebastien Peirani

Dancing in the dark: galactic properties trace spin swings along the cosmic web

A large-scale hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, Horizon-AGN , is used to investigate the alignment between the spin of galaxies and the large-scale cosmic filaments above redshift one. The analysis of more than 150 000 galaxies with morphological diversity in a 100h −1 Mpc comoving box size shows that the spin of low-mass, rotationdominated, blue, star-forming galaxies is preferentially aligned with their neighbouring filaments. High-mass, dispersion-dominated, red, quiescent galaxies tend to have a spin perpendicular to nearby filaments. The reorientation of the spin of massive galaxies is provided by galaxy mergers which are significant in the mass build up of high-mass galaxies. We find that the stellar mass transition from alignment to misalignment happens around 3×10 10 M⊙. This is consistent with earlier findings of a dark matter mass transition for the orientation of the spin of halos (5 × 10 11 M⊙ at the same redshift from Codis et al. 2012). With these numerical evidence, we advocate a scenario in which galaxies form in the vorticity-rich neighbourhood of filaments, and migrate towards the nodes of the cosmic web as they convert their orbital angular momentum into spin. The signature of this process can be traced to the physical and morphological properties of galaxies, as measured relative to the cosmic web. We argue that a strong source of feedback such as Active Galactic Nuclei is mandatory to quench in situ star formation in massive galaxies. It allows mergers to play their key role by reducing post-merger gas inflows and, therefore, keeping galaxy spins misaligned with cosmic filaments. It also promotes diversity amongst galaxy properties.

AGN-driven quenching of star formation: morphological and dynamical implications for early-type galaxies

In order to understand the physical mechanisms at work during the formation of massive early-type galaxies, we performed six zoomed hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of halos in the mass range 4.3 10^12 < M_vir < 8.0 10^13 M_sun at z=0, using the Adaptive Mesh Refinement code RAMSES. These simulations explore the role of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), through jets powered by the accretion onto supermassive black holes on the formation of massive elliptical galaxies. In the absence of AGN feedback, large amounts of stars accumulate in the central galaxies to form overly massive, blue, compact and rotation-dominated galaxies. Powerful AGN jets transform the central galaxies into red extended and dispersion-dominated galaxies. This morphological transformation of disc galaxies into elliptical galaxies is driven by the efficient quenching of the in situ star formation due to AGN feedback, which transform these galaxies into systems built up by accretion. For galaxies mainly formed by accretion, the proportion of stars deposited farther away from the centre increases, and galaxies have larger sizes. The accretion is also directly responsible for randomising the stellar orbits, increasing the amount of dispersion over rotation of stars as a function of time. Finally, we find that our galaxies simulated with AGN feedback better match the observed scaling laws, such as the size-mass, velocity dispersion-mass, fundamental plane relations, and slope of the total density profiles at z~0, from dynamical and strong lensing constraints.

The role of minor mergers in the recent star formation history of early-type galaxies

We demonstrate that the large scatter in the ultra-violet (UV) colours of intermediate- mass early-type galaxies in the local Universe and the inferred low-level recent star formation in these objects can be reproduced by minor mergers in the standardCDM cosmology. Numerical simulations of mergers with mass ratios � 1:4, with reasonable assumptions for the ages, metallicities and dust properties of the merger progenitors, produce good agreement to the observed UV colours of the early-type population, if the infalling satellites are assumed to have (cold) gas fractions � 20%. Early-types that sat- isfy (NUV r) . 3.8 are likely to have experienced mergers with mass ratios between 1:4 and 1:6 within the last � 1.5 Gyrs, while those that satisfy 3.8 < (NUV r) < 5.5 are consistent with either recent mergers with mass ratios � 1:6 or mergers with higher mass ratios that occurred more than � 1.5 Gyrs in the past. We demonstrate that the early-type colour-magnitude relations and colour distributions in both the UV and optical spectral ranges are consistent with the expected frequency of minor merging activity in the standardCDM cosmology at low redshift. We present a strong plausi- bility argument for minor mergers to be the principal mechanism behind the large UV scatter and associated low-level recent star formation observed in early-type galaxies in the nearby Universe.

The Horizon-AGN simulation: morphological diversity of galaxies promoted by AGN feedback

The interplay between cosmic gas accretion on to galaxies and galaxy mergers drives the observed morphological diversity of galaxies. By comparing the state-of-the-art hydrodynamical cosmological simulations Horizon-AGN and Horizon-noAGN, we unambiguously identify the critical role of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in setting up the correct galaxy morphology for the massive end of the population. With AGN feedback, typical kinematic and morpho-metric properties of galaxy populations as well as the galaxy-halo mass relation are in much better agreement with observations. Only AGN feedback allows massive galaxies at the centre of groups and clusters to become ellipticals, while without AGN feedback those galaxies reform discs. It is the merger-enhanced AGN activity that is able to freeze the morphological type of the post-merger remnant by durably quenching its quiescent star formation. Hence morphology is shown to be driven not only by mass but also by the nature of cosmic accretion: at constant galaxy mass, ellipticals are galaxies that are mainly assembled through mergers, while discs are preferentially built from the in situ star formation fed by smooth cosmic gas infall.

A principal component analysis of quasar UV spectra at z ~ 3

From a principal component analysis (PCA) of 78 z ∼ 3 high-quality quasar spectra in the SDSS-DR7 we derive the principal components that characterize the QSO continuum over the full available wavelength range. The shape of the mean continuum is similar to that measured at low-z (z ∼ 1), but the equivalent width of the emission lines is larger at low redshift. We calculate the correlation between fluxes at different wavelengths and find that the emission line fluxes in the red part of the spectrum are correlated with those in the blue part. We construct a projection matrix to predict the continuum in the Lyman-α forest from the red part of the spectrum. We apply this matrix to quasars in the SDSS-DR7 to derive the evolution with redshift of the mean flux in the Lyman-α forest caused by the absorption by the intergalactic neutral hydrogen. A change in the evolution of the mean flux is apparent around z ∼ 3 as a steeper decrease of the mean flux at higher redshifts. The same evolution is found when the continuum is estimated from the extrapolation of a power-law continuum fitted in the red part of the quasar spectrum if a correction derived from simple simulations is applied. Our findings are consistent with previous determinations using high spectral resolution data. We provide the PCA eigenvectors over the wavelength range 1020−2000 A and the distribution of their weights that can be used to simulate QSO mock spectra.

Artificial neural networks for quasar selection and photometric redshift determination

Context. Baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) and their effects on the matter power spectrum can be studied using the Lyman-α absorption signature of the matter density field along quasar (QSO) lines of sight. A measurement sufficiently accurate to provide useful cosmological constraints requires the observation of ~105 quasars in the redshift range 2.2 < z < 3.5 over ~8000 deg2. Such a survey is planned by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) project of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III). Aims: We assess one of the challenges for this project, that of building from five-band imaging data a list of targets that contains the largest number of quasars in the required redshift range. In practice, we perform a stellar rejection of more than two orders of magnitude with a selection efficiency for quasars better than 50% to magnitudes as bright as g ~ 22. Methods: To obtain an appropriate target list and estimate quasar redshifts, we develop artificial neural networks (ANNs) with a multilayer perceptron architecture. The input variables are photometric measurements, i.e., the object magnitudes and their errors in the five bands (ugriz) of the SDSS photometry. The ANN developed for target selection provides a continuous output variable between 0 for non-quasar point-like objects to 1 for quasars. A second ANN estimates the QSO redshift z using the photometric information. Results: For target selection, we achieve a non-quasar point-like object rejection of 99.6% and 98.5% for a quasar efficiency of, respectively, 50% and 85%, comparable to the performances of traditional methods. The photometric redshift precision is on the order of 0.1 over the region relevant to BAO studies. These statistical methods, developed in the context of the BOSS project, can easily be extended to any quasar selection and/or determination of their photometric redshift.

Suppressing star formation in quiescent galaxies with supermassive black hole winds

Quiescent galaxies with little or no ongoing star formation dominate the population of galaxies with masses above 2 × 1010 times that of the Sun; the number of quiescent galaxies has increased by a factor of about 25 over the past ten billion years (refs 1, 2, 3, 4). Once star formation has been shut down, perhaps during the quasar phase of rapid accretion onto a supermassive black hole, an unknown mechanism must remove or heat the gas that is subsequently accreted from either stellar mass loss or mergers and that would otherwise cool to form stars. Energy output from a black hole accreting at a low rate has been proposed, but observational evidence for this in the form of expanding hot gas shells is indirect and limited to radio galaxies at the centres of clusters, which are too rare to explain the vast majority of the quiescent population. Here we report bisymmetric emission features co-aligned with strong ionized-gas velocity gradients from which we infer the presence of centrally driven winds in typical quiescent galaxies that host low-luminosity active nuclei. These galaxies are surprisingly common, accounting for as much as ten per cent of the quiescent population with masses around 2 × 1010 times that of the Sun. In a prototypical example, we calculate that the energy input from the galaxy’s low-level active supermassive black hole is capable of driving the observed wind, which contains sufficient mechanical energy to heat ambient, cooler gas (also detected) and thereby suppress star formation.

The angular momentum of dark haloes: merger and accretion effects

We present new results on the angular momentum evolution of dark matter haloes. Haloes, from N-body simulations, are classified according to their mass growth histories into two categories: the accretion category contains haloes whose mass has varied continuously and smoothly, while the merger category contains haloes which have undergone sudden and significant mass variations (greater than 1/3 of their initial mass per event). We find that the angular momentum grows in both cases, well into the non-linear regime. For individual haloes we observe strong correlation between the angular momentum variation and the mass variation. The rate of growth of both mass and angular momentum has a characteristic transition time at around z ∼ 1.5-1.8, with an early fast phase followed by a late slow phase. Haloes of the merger catalogue acquire more angular momentum even when the scaling with mass is taken into account. The spin parameter has a different behaviour for the two classes: there is a decrease with time for haloes in the accretion catalogue whereas a small increase is observed for the merger catalogue. When the two catalogues are considered together, no significant variation of the spin parameter distribution with the redshift is obtained. We have also found that the spin parameter neither depends on the halo mass nor on the cosmological model. From our simple model developed for the formation of a disc galaxy similar to the Milky Way, we conclude that our own halo must have captured satellites in order to acquire the required angular momentum and to achieve most of the disc around z ∼ 1.6. The distribution of the angular momentum indicates that at z ∼ 1.6 only 22 per cent of the haloes have angular momentum of magnitude comparable to that of disc galaxies in the mass range 10 10 -5 x 10 11 M ○. , clearly insufficient to explain the present observed abundance of these objects.

Swirling around filaments: are large-scale structure vortices spinning up dark haloes?

The kinematic analysis of dark matter and hydrodynamical simulations suggests that the vorticity in large-scale structure is mostly confined to, and predominantly aligned with their filaments, with an excess of probability of 20 per cent to have the angle between vorticity and filaments direction lower than 60 o relative to random orientations. The cross sections of these filaments are typically partitioned into four quadrants with opposite vorticity sign, arising from multiple flows, originating from neighbouring walls. The spins of halos embedded within these filaments are consistently aligned with this vorticity for any halo mass, with a stronger alignment for the most massive structures up to an excess of probability of 165 per cent. The global geometry of the flow within the cosmic web is therefore qualitatively consistent with a spin acquisition for smaller halos induced by this large-scale coherence, as argued in Codis et al. (2012). In effect, secondary anisotropic infall (originating from the vortex-rich filament within which these lower-mass halos form) dominates the angular momentum budget of these halos. The transition mass from alignment to orthogonality is related to the size of a given multi-flow region with a given polarity. This transition may be reconciled with the standard tidal torque theory if the latter is augmented so as to account for the larger scale anisotropic environment of walls and filaments.

Composite star formation histories of early‐type galaxies from minor mergers: prospects for WFC3

The star formation history of nearby early-type galaxies is investigated via numerical modelling. Idealized hydrodynamical N-body simulations with a star formation prescription are used to study the minor merger process between a giant galaxy (host) and a less massive spiral galaxy (satellite) with reasonable assumptions for the ages and metallicities of the merger progenitors. We find that the evolution of the star formation rate is extended over several dynamical times and shows peaks which correspond to pericentre passages of the satellite. The newly formed stars are mainly located in the central part of the satellite remnant while the older stars of the initial disk are deposited at larger radii in shell-like structures. After the final plunge of the satellite, star formation in the central part of the remnant can continue for several Gyrs depending on the star formation efficiency. Although the mass fraction in new stars is small, we find that the half-mass radius differs from the half-light radius in the V and H bands. Moreover synthetic 2D images in J, H, NUV, Hb and V bands, using the characteristic filters of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), reveal that residual star formation induced by gas-rich minor mergers can be clearly observed during and after the final plunge, especially in the NUV band, for interacting systems at (z<0.023) over moderate numbers of orbits (~2 orbits correspond to typical exposure times of ~3600 sec). This suggests that WFC3 has the potential to resolve these substructures, characterize plausible past merger episodes, and give clues to the formation of early-type galaxies.