The response of dark matter haloes to elliptical galaxy formation: a new test for quenching scenarios

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to examine how dark matter haloes respond to elliptical galaxy formation and proposes that halo response can distinguish between different quenching mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a new test based on dark matter halo response to differentiate between ejective and suppressive galaxy quenching scenarios.

Findings

Dark matter haloes contract in forced quenching simulations.

Dry merging alone does not reverse halo contraction.

Halo response can serve as a test for quenching mechanisms.

Abstract

We use cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations with the SPH code gasoline of four haloes of mass M_{200} \sim 10^{13}\Msun to study the response of the dark matter to elliptical galaxy formation. Our simulations include metallicity dependent gas cooling, star formation, and feedback from massive stars and supernovae, but not active galactic nuclei (AGN). At z=2 the progenitor galaxies have stellar to halo mass ratios consistent with halo abundance matching, assuming a Salpeter initial mass function. However by z=0 the standard runs suffer from the well known overcooling problem, overpredicting the stellar masses by a factor of > 4. To mimic a suppressive halo quenching scenario, in our forced quenching (FQ) simulations, cooling and star formation are switched off at z=2. The resulting z=0 galaxies have stellar masses, sizes and circular velocities close to what is observed. Relative to the control simulations, the dark matter haloes in the FQ simulations have contracted, with central dark matter density slopes d\log\rho/d\log r \sim -1.5, showing that dry merging alone is unable to fully reverse the contraction that occurs at z>2. Simulations in the literature with AGN feedback however, have found expansion or no net change in the dark matter halo. Thus the response of the dark matter halo to galaxy formation may provide a new test to distinguish between ejective and suppressive quenching mechanisms.