Atomic hydrogen in IllustrisTNG galaxies: the impact of environment parallelled with local 21-cm surveys

TL;DR

This study uses the IllustrisTNG simulation to analyze how environment affects atomic hydrogen in galaxies, revealing differences between satellites and centrals and comparing results with recent surveys.

Contribution

It extends post-processing methods for gas phase separation and creates detailed mocks to compare simulation data with real HI survey observations.

Findings

Satellites are about 3 times poorer in HI than centrals of the same stellar mass.

Large-scale HI measurements include gas not bound to the galaxy, affecting mass estimates.

HI stripping in satellites is linked to quenching, but observations suggest HI is stripped before star formation declines.

Abstract

We investigate the influence of environment on the cold-gas properties of galaxies at z=0 within the TNG100 cosmological, magnetohydrodynamic simulation, part of the IllustrisTNG suite. We extend previous post-processing methods for breaking gas cells into their atomic and molecular phases, and build detailed mocks to comprehensively compare to the latest surveys of atomic hydrogen (HI) in nearby galaxies, namely ALFALFA and xGASS. We use TNG100 to explore the HI content, star formation activity, and angular momentum of satellite galaxies, each as a function of environment, and find that satellites are typically a factor of ~3 poorer in HI than centrals of the same stellar mass, with the exact offset depending sensitively on parent halo mass. Due to the large physical scales on which HI measurements are made (~45--245 kpc), contributions from gas not bound to the galaxy of interest but in the same line of sight crucially lead to larger HI mass measurements in the mocks in many cases, ultimately aligning with observations. This effect is mass-dependent and naturally greater for satellites than centrals, as satellites are never isolated by definition. We also show that HI stripping in TNG100 satellites is closely accompanied by quenching, in tension with observational data that instead favour that HI is preferentially stripped before star formation is reduced.