On the Mass Assembly History of the Local Group
Edoardo Carlesi, Yehuda Hoffman, Stefan Gottl\"ober, Noam I., Libeskind, Alexander Knebe, Gustavo Yepes, Sergey V. Pilipenko

TL;DR
This study uses constrained simulations to analyze the mass assembly history of the Milky Way and Andromeda, revealing they formed and merged earlier than in standard models, influenced by their local environment.
Contribution
It demonstrates that environment-specific constrained simulations produce earlier formation and merger times for LG galaxies compared to standard cosmological simulations.
Findings
Constrained simulations show earlier median formation times.
Last major mergers occurred approximately 1.5 Gyr earlier.
Higher probability of early last major mergers in constrained LGs.
Abstract
In this work an ensemble of simulated Local Group analogues is used to constrain the properties of the mass assembly history of the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) galaxies. These objects have been obtained using the constrained simulation technique, which ensures that simulated LGs live within a large scale environment akin to the observed one. Our results are compared against a standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) series of simulations which use the same cosmological parameters. This allows us to single out the effects of the constraints on the results. We find that (a) the median constrained merging histories for M31 and MW live above the standard ones at the 1- level, (b) the median formation time takes place 0.5 Gyr earlier than unconstrained values, while the latest major merger happens on average 1.5 Gyr earlier and (c) the probability for both…
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