Semi-analytic galaxy formation in early dark energy cosmologies

Abstract

We study the impact of early dark energy (EDE) cosmologies on galaxy properties by coupling high-resolution numerical simulations with semi-analytic modeling (SAM) of galaxy formation and evolution. EDE models are characterized by a non-vanishing high-redshift contribution of dark energy, producing an earlier growth of structures and a modification of large-scale structure evolution. They can be viewed as typical representatives of non-standard dark energy models in which only the expansion history is modified, and hence the impact on galaxy formation is indirect. We show that in EDE cosmologies the predicted space density of galaxies is enhanced at all scales with respect to the standard LCDM scenario, and the corresponding cosmic star formation history and stellar mass density is increased at high-redshift. We compare these results with a set of theoretical predictions obtained with alternative SAMs applied to our reference LCDM simulation, yielding a rough measure of the systematic uncertainty of the models. We find that the modifications in galaxy properties induced by EDE cosmologies are of the same order of magnitude as intra-SAM variations for a standard LCDM realization (unless rather extreme EDE models are considered), suggesting that is difficult to use such predictions alone to disentangle between different cosmological scenarios. However, when independent information on the underlying properties of host dark matter haloes is included, the SAM predictions on galaxy bias may provide important clues on the expansion history and the equation-of-state evolution.Comment: 7 pages; 4 figures, MNRAS submitte

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Galaxy Environment in the 3D-HST Fields: Witnessing the Onset of Satellite Quenching at z ∼ 1–2

“…Red circles mark the position of galaxy overdensities from Salimbeni et al (2009) who used a smoothed 3D density technique from the GOODS-MUSIC catalogue to search for overdensities (the size of the circle is arbitrary and fixed). Fontanot et al 2012;Guo et al 2013a).…”

Early dark energy and its interaction with dark matter

“…EDE models can potentially alleviate the coincidence problem. Furthermore, they can influence the cosmic microwave background [3][4][5][6][7][8][9], big-bang nucleosynthesis [10] and large-scale structure formation [11][12][13][14][17][18][19]. For now, it would be fair to say that there are no strong observational constraints on the EDE models, and it is especially difficult to discriminate EDE models which have w = −1 at present from the ΛCDM model.…”

“…The EDE model described in (1) has been confronted to the type Ia supernova test including samples at z > 1.25 [15] [16]. The impact of this EDE cosmology on galaxy properties has been studied by coupling high-resolution numerical simulations with semi-analytic modeling of galaxy formation and evolution [13]. The available results highlight that such EDE model leads to important modifications in the galaxy properties with respect to a standard ΛCDM universe.…”