Merger Histories and Environments of Dwarf AGN in IllustrisTNG
Mikkel T Kristensen, Kevin Pimbblet, Brad Gibson, Samantha Penny,, Sophie Koudmani

TL;DR
This study uses cosmological simulations to explore how merger histories and environments influence active galactic nuclei activity in dwarf galaxies, revealing significant differences between AGN and non-AGN dwarfs.
Contribution
It demonstrates that merger history and environment are correlated with AGN activity in dwarf galaxies within the IllustrisTNG simulations, extending understanding into the low-mass galaxy regime.
Findings
AGN dwarfs are more likely in less dense environments
Recent minor mergers are more common in intermediate AGN activity
Non-AGN dwarfs tend to reside longer in dense environments
Abstract
The relationship between active galactic nuclei activity and environment has been long discussed, but it is unclear if these relations extend into the dwarf galaxy mass regime -- in part due to the limits in both observations and simulations. We aim to investigate if the merger histories and environments are significantly different between AGN and non-AGN dwarf galaxies in cosmological simulations, which may be indicative of the importance of these for AGN activity in dwarf galaxies, and whether these results are in line with observations. Using the IllustrisTNG flagship TNG100-1 run, 6\,771 dwarf galaxies are found with 3\,863 (57 per cent) having some level of AGN activity. In order to quantify `environment', two measures are used: 1) the distance to a galaxy's 10th nearest neighbour at 6 redshifts and 2) the time since last merger for three different minimum merger mass…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
