Virgo: an unlikely cluster of galaxies because of its environment

Sorce, Jenny G.; Blaizot, Jérémy; Dubois, Yohan

doi:10.1093/mnras/stz1080

Cited by 19 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…At a distance of just ∼16-18 Mpc (Mei et al 2007;Planck Collaboration et al 2016) from Earth, and sitting in the middle of the northern Spring sky, Virgo has been the primary target of most gas surveys focusing on understanding the role of environment on the gas cycle of galaxies. Given that Virgo may not be the average nearby cluster, at least in terms of accretion history and number of substructures (Sorce, Blaizot, & Dubois 2019), this is something to keep in mind.…”

Section: The Case For Hi Strippingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dawes Review 9: The role of cold gas stripping on the star formation quenching of satellite galaxies

Cortese

Catinella

Smith

2021

Publ. Astron. Soc. Aust.

133

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One of the key open questions in extragalactic astronomy is what stops star formation in galaxies. While it is clear that the cold gas reservoir, which fuels the formation of new stars, must be affected first, how this happens and what are the dominant physical mechanisms involved is still a matter of debate. At least for satellite galaxies, it is generally accepted that internal processes alone cannot be responsible for fully quenching their star formation, but that environment should play an important, if not dominant, role. In nearby clusters, we see examples of cold gas being removed from the star-forming discs of galaxies moving through the intracluster medium, but whether active stripping is widespread and/or necessary to halt star formation in satellites, or quenching is just a consequence of the inability of these galaxies to replenish their cold gas reservoirs, remains unclear. In this work, we review the current status of environmental studies of cold gas in star-forming satellites in the local Universe from an observational perspective, focusing on the evidence for a physical link between cold gas stripping and quenching of the star formation. We find that stripping of cold gas is ubiquitous in satellite galaxies in both group and cluster environments. While hydrodynamical mechanisms such as ram pressure are important, the emerging picture across the full range of dark matter halos and stellar masses is a complex one, where different physical mechanisms may act simultaneously and cannot always be easily separated. Most importantly, we show that stripping does not always lead to full quenching, as only a fraction of the cold gas reservoir might be affected at the first pericentre passage. We argue that this is a key point to reconcile apparent tensions between statistical and detailed analyses of satellite galaxies, as well as disagreements between various estimates of quenching timescales. We conclude by highlighting several outstanding questions where we expect to see substantial progress in the coming decades, thanks to the advent of the Square Kilometre Array and its precursors, as well as the next-generation optical and millimeter facilities.

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Section: The Case For Hi Strippingmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Dawes Review 9: The role of cold gas stripping on the star formation quenching of satellite galaxies

Cortese

Catinella

Smith

2021

Publ. Astron. Soc. Aust.

133

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“…Namely, while the Virgo-like clusters used to accrete lots of objects in their early stages of evolution, nowadays they still do but to a much smaller extent. In a more recent study (Sorce et al 2019) that enlarged our previous sample from 15 to 200 Virgo counterparts and increased their resolution by a factor of 3, we found that this kind of assembly history is rare and that this is most probably due to the local environment. This study compared the properties of more than 400 cluster-size random halos to the 200 Virgo-like halos.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 58%

“…Local observational data used to constrain the initial conditions of the simulations are distances of galaxies and groups converted into peculiar velocities (Sorce & Tempel 2018;Sorce et al 2016b) that are bias minimized (Sorce 2015). The details of the algorithms and steps to get the simulations are given in Sorce et al (2019).…”

Section: Constrained Simulations and Virgo-like Halosmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Past History of Galaxy Clusters told by their present neighbors

Sorce,

Gottlöber,

Yepes

2020

Preprint

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Galaxy clusters can play a key role in modern cosmology provided their evolution is properly understood. However, observed clusters give us only a single timeframe of their dynamical state. Therefore, finding present observable data of clusters that are well correlated to their assembly history constitutes an inestimable tool for cosmology. Former studies correlating environmental descriptors of clusters to their formation history are dominated by halo mass -environment relations. This paper presents a mass-free correlation between the present neighbor distribution of cluster-size halos and the latter mass assembly history. From the Big Multidark simulation, we extract two large samples of random halos with masses ranging from Virgo to Coma cluster sizes. Additionally, to find the main environmental culprit for the formation history of the Virgo cluster, we compare the Virgosize halos to 200 Virgo-like halos extracted from simulations that resemble the local Universe. The number of neighbors at different cluster-centric distances permits discriminating between clusters with different mass accretion histories. Similarly to Virgo-like halos, clusters with numerous neighbors within a distance of about 2 times their virial radius experience a transition at z ≈ 1 between an active period of mass accretion, relative to the mean, and a quiet history. On the contrary, clusters with few neighbors share an opposite trend: from passive to active assembly histories. Additionally, clusters with massive companions within about 4 times their virial radius tend to have recent active merging histories. Therefore, the radial distribution of cluster neighbors provides invaluable insights into the past history of these objects.

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“…Note that most simulations of "MW type galaxies" are not random but require either quiet merger histories or isolation. What is perhaps surprising is that constrained simulations based on measurement of the local velocity field has already been shown to produce significantly and systemically different mass accretion histories for the simulated Virgo cluster (Sorce et al 2016c(Sorce et al , 2019. Here a similar behaviour is seen on mass scales that are 2 orders of magnitude smaller.…”

Section: The Mass Accretion History Of the Hestiamentioning

confidence: 95%

“…2.1). The CosmicFlows database and catalogue have been used extensively before to study the local universe, including the cold spot repeller (Courtois et al 2017), the Vela super cluster (Courtois et al 2019), the bulk flow (Hoffman et al 2015), and the Virgo cluster (Sorce et al 2016c(Sorce et al , 2019Olchanski & Sorce 2018). As will be demonstrated below, producing such constrained simulations is not trivial but will provide an optimum testing ground for understanding both the role of our environment in shaping the LG as well as the holistic formation of LG galaxies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Hestia project: simulations of the Local Group

Libeskind,

Carlesi,

Grand

et al. 2020

Preprint

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We present the Hestia simulation suite: High-resolutions Environmental Simulations of The Immediate Area, a set of cosmological simulations of the Local Group. Initial conditions constrained by the observed peculiar velocity of nearby galaxies are employed to accurately simulate the local cosmography. Halo pairs that resemble the Local Group are found in low resolutions constrained, dark matter only simulations, and selected for higher resolution magneto hydrodynamic simulation using the Arepo code. Baryonic physics follows the Auriga model of galaxy formation. The simulations contain a high resolution region of 3-5 Mpc in radius from the Local Group midpoint embedded in the correct cosmographic landscape. Within this region a simulated Local Group consisting of a Milky Way and Andromeda like galaxy forms, whose description is in excellent agreement with observations. The simulated Local Group galaxies resemble the Milky Way and Andromeda in terms of their halo mass, mass ratio, stellar disc mass, morphology separation, relative velocity, rotation curves, bulge-disc morphology, satellite galaxy stellar mass function, satellite radial distribution and in some cases, the presence of a Magellanic cloud like object. Because these simulations properly model the Local Group in their cosmographic context, they provide a testing ground for questions where environment is thought to play an important role.

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Virgo: an unlikely cluster of galaxies because of its environment

Cited by 19 publications

References 86 publications

The Dawes Review 9: The role of cold gas stripping on the star formation quenching of satellite galaxies

The Dawes Review 9: The role of cold gas stripping on the star formation quenching of satellite galaxies

The Past History of Galaxy Clusters told by their present neighbors

The Hestia project: simulations of the Local Group

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