The galaxy-halo connection of emission-line galaxies in IllustrisTNG

TL;DR

This study uses the IllustrisTNG simulation to analyze the distribution and environmental dependence of emission-line galaxies at redshift 1, revealing their preference for lower-density regions and the importance of environment in galaxy-halo modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of ELG halo occupation and environmental effects using hydrodynamical simulations, highlighting the need to incorporate environment dependence and assembly bias in models.

Findings

ELGs are twice as likely in low-density regions compared to mass-selected galaxies.

The occupation of haloes by central ELGs peaks at about 20%.

Environment dependence significantly impacts galaxy clustering and modeling accuracy.

Abstract

We employ the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG-300-1 to explore the halo occupation distribution (HOD) and environmental dependence of luminous star-forming emission-line galaxies (ELGs) at $z \sim 1$. Such galaxies are key targets for current and upcoming cosmological surveys. We select model galaxies through cuts in colour-colour space allowing for a direct comparison with the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) surveys and then compare them with galaxies selected based on specific star-formation rate (sSFR) and stellar mass. We demonstrate that the ELG populations are twice more likely to reside in lower-density regions (sheets) compared with the mass-selected populations and twice less likely to occupy the densest regions of the cosmic web (knots). We also show that the colour-selected and sSFR-selected ELGs exhibit very similar occupation and clustering statistics, finding that the agreement is best for lower redshifts. In contrast with the mass-selected sample, the occupation of haloes by a central ELG peaks at $\sim$20\%. We furthermore explore the dependence of the HOD and the auto-correlation on environment, noticing that at fixed halo mass, galaxies in high-density regions cluster about 10 times more strongly than low-density ones. This result suggests that we should model carefully the galaxy-halo relation and implement assembly bias effects into our models (estimated at $\sim$4\% of the clustering of the DESI colour-selected sample at $z = 0.8$). Finally, we apply a simple mock recipe to recover the clustering on large scales ($r \gtrsim 1 \ {\rm Mpc}/h$) to within 1\% by augmenting the HOD model with an environment dependence, demonstrating the power of adopting flexible population models.