How do uncertainties in galaxy formation physics impact field-level galaxy bias?

TL;DR

This study compares different galaxy formation models to understand how uncertainties affect galaxy bias parameters, finding that these uncertainties are relatively small and manageable for cosmological analyses.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid bias expansion applied to diverse galaxy samples, revealing the impact of galaxy formation uncertainties on bias parameters and demonstrating their limited effect.

Findings

Distinct bias parameters for quenched and star-forming galaxies

Small scatter in bias parameters across models conditioned on galaxy selection

Assembly bias causes minor deviations from analytic bias predictions

Abstract

Our ability to extract cosmological information from galaxy surveys is limited by uncertainties in the galaxy-dark matter halo relationship for a given galaxy population, which are governed by the intricacies of galaxy formation. To quantify these uncertainties, we examine quenched and star-forming galaxies using two distinct approaches to modeling galaxy formation: UniverseMachine, an empirical semianalytic model, and the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulation. We apply a second-order hybrid N-body perturbative bias expansion to each galaxy sample, enabling direct comparison of modeling approaches and revealing how uncertainties in the galaxy-halo connection affect bias parameters and non-Poisson noise across number densities and redshifts. Notably, we find that quenched and star-forming galaxies occupy distinct parts of the bias parameter space, and that the scatter induced from these different galaxy formation models is small when conditioned on similar selections of galaxies. We also detect the signature of assembly bias in our samples; this leads to small but significant deviations from analytic bias predictions, while assembly bias-removed samples match these predictions well. This work indicates that galaxy samples from a spectrum of reasonable, physically motivated models for galaxy formation give a relatively small range of field-level galaxy bias parameters. We estimate a set of priors from these models that should be useful in extracting cosmological constraints from luminous red galaxy- and emission line galaxy-like samples. Looking forward, careful estimates of the range of impacts of galaxy formation, for a given sample and cosmological analysis, will be an essential ingredient for extracting the most precise cosmological information from current and future large galaxy surveys.