Bibcode
Stringer, M.; Trujillo, I.; Dalla Vecchia, C.; Martinez-Valpuesta, I.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 449, Issue 3, p.2396-2404
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5
2015
Citations
28
Refereed citations
27
Description
To provide a quantitative cosmological context to ongoing observational
work on the formation histories and location of compact massive
galaxies, we locate and study a sample of exceptionally compact systems
in the BOLSHOI simulation, using the dark matter structural parameters
from a real, compact massive galaxy (NGC 1277) as a basis for our
working criteria. We find that over 80 per cent of objects in this
nominal compact category are substructures of more massive groups or
clusters, and that the probability of a given massive substructure being
this compact increases significantly with the mass of the host
structure; rising to ˜30 per cent for the most massive clusters in
the simulation. Tracking the main progenitors of this subsample back to
z = 2, we find them all to be distinct structures with scale radii and
densities representative of the population as a whole at this epoch.
What does characterize their histories, in addition to mostly becoming
substructures, is that they have almost all experienced below-average
mass accretion since z = 2; a third of them barely retaining, or even
losing mass during the intervening 10 Gyr.
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