Galaxy evolution is still one of the most hotly debated topics in present-day astronomy. Some of the open issues focus around the relative importance between star formation and mergers in building galaxies. Additionally, the new data from the ongoing facilities have observed galaxies at unprecedent redshifts and distances, with their origin being still unclear and have motivated the development of data-driven models. In this talk, I present a new flexible approach, to address key questions of galaxy evolution in a self-consistent and transparent way. Ours is a hybrid method based on a semi-empirical approach and inclusive of elements reminiscent of a semi-analytical model, significantly reducing the number of initial assumptions and parameters. In our model, the galaxy stellar mass growth is associated with the growth of their host dark matter haloes through abundance matching between the halo accretion rate and the star formation rate, or between halo mass and stellar mass. Galaxy mergers are self-consistently incorporated using the dark matter halo merger trees, with the stellar mass assigned at infall via the scaling relations characterizing their central counterparts at that redshift. The model is applied also to the growth of central supermassive black holes, which are evolved via input black hole accretion rates at given stellar mass and redshift. We also explore relevant star formation quenching mechanisms, e.g., induced by supermassive black hole or halo quenching. I present results on: 1) galaxy growth histories against observed galaxy abundances and star formation histories; 2) the stellar mass-halo mass distribution; 3) some initial results on galaxy quenching.
23/01/2025
SPEAKER: Dr. Hao Fu (Fudan University, Shanghai, China)
We kindly invite you to the Tor Vergata Astrophysics Seminar on Thursday Jan. 23rd at 11:00 CET.
Join in person in Aula Grassano (Physics Department, Tor Vergata University of Rome) or online on the MS Teams at: https://rebrand.ly/Seminar-Shankar-Fu