Galaxy formation in semi-analytic models and cosmological hydrodynamic zoom simulations

TL;DR

This paper compares cosmological hydrodynamic zoom simulations with semi-analytic models to understand galaxy formation, revealing significant differences in star formation efficiency, gas accretion, and growth modes, and discusses missing physics in models.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison highlighting key discrepancies and missing processes in semi-analytic models versus hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation.

Findings

Simulations have higher star formation efficiencies than SAMs.

Simulations show earlier star formation and a transition to accretion-driven growth.

SAMs overpredict gas accretion rates and hot gas fractions.

Abstract

We present a detailed comparison between numerical cosmological hydrodynamic zoom simulations and semi-analytic models (SAMs) run within merger trees extracted from the simulations. The high-resolution simulations represent 48 individual halos with virial masses in the range 2.4*10^11M_sun < M_Halo < 3.3*10^13M_sun. They include radiative H & He cooling, photo-ionization, star formation and thermal SN feedback. We compare with different SAM versions including only this complement of physical processes, and also ones including supernova driven winds, metal cooling, and feedback from AGN. Our analysis is focused on the cosmic evolution of the baryon content in galaxies and its division into various components (stars, cold gas, and hot gas). Both the SAMs and simulations are compared with observational relations between halo mass and stellar mass, and between stellar mass and star formation rate, at low and high redshift. The simulations turn out to have much higher star formation efficiencies (by about a factor of ten) than the SAMs. Therefore the cold gas is consumed much more rapidly in the simulations and stars form much earlier. Also, simulations show a transition between stellar mass growth that is dominated by in situ formation of stars to growth that is predominantly through accretion of stars formed in external galaxies. In SAMs, stellar growth is always dominated by in situ star formation. In addition, SAMs overpredict the overall gas accretion rates relative to the simulations, and overestimate the fraction of "hot" relative to "cold" accretion. We discuss the reasons for these discrepancies, and identify several physical processes that are missing in our SAM. We also highlight physical processes that are neglected in the simulations studied here, but which appear to be crucial in order to understand the properties of real galaxies.