Dark matter stripping in galaxy clusters: a look at the stellar-to-halo mass relation in the Illustris simulation

Abstract

Satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters represent a significant fraction of the global galaxy population. Because of the unusual dense environment of clusters, their evolution is driven by different mechanisms than the ones affecting field or central galaxies. Understanding the different interactions they are subject to, and how they are influenced by them, is therefore an important step towards explaining the global picture of galaxy evolution. In this paper, we use the publicly-available high resolution hydrodynamical simulation Illustris-1 to study satellite galaxies in the three most massive host haloes (with masses $M_{200} > 10^{14}\,h^{-1}\rm{M}_{\odot}$) at $z=0$. We measure the Stellar-to-Halo Mass Relation (hereafter SHMR) of the galaxies, and find that for satellites it is shifted towards lower halo masses compared to the SHMR of central galaxies. We provide simple fitting functions for both the central and satellite SHMR. To explain the shift between the two, we follow the satellite galaxies since their time of accretion into the clusters, and quantify the impact of dark matter stripping and star formation. We find that subhaloes start losing their dark matter as soon as they get closer than $\sim 1.5\times R_{\rm{vir}}$ to the centre of their host, and that up to 80\% of their dark matter content gets stripped during infall. On the other hand, star formation quenching appears to be delayed, and galaxies continue to form stars for a few Gyr after accretion. The combination of these two effects impacts the ratio of stellar to dark matter mass which varies drastically during infall, from 0.03 to 0.3.