Galaxy formation in a variety of hierarchical models

Abstract

We predict the observable properties of the galaxy population in popular hierarchical models of galaxy formation. We employ a detailed semianalytic procedure which incorporates the formation and merging of dark matter halos, the shock heating and radiative cooling of gas, self-regulated star formation, the merging of galaxies within dark matter halos, and the spectral evolution of the stellar populations. We contrast the standard CDM cosmogony with variants of the CDM model having either a low value of H_0, or a low value of Omega with or without a cosmological constant. In addition, we compare galaxy formation in these CDM universes with a CHDM model. We find that although the models have some success in remedying the shortcomings of the standard CDM cosmogony, none of these new models produce broad agreement with the whole range of observations. Although the low-Omega and Omega+Lambda=1 CDM models reduce the discrepancy between the predicted and observed Tully-Fisher relations (the main weakness of galaxy formation in standard CDM), these models predict an inverted colour-magnitude relation and do not produce an exponential cut-off at the bright end of the galaxy luminosity function. All of our models predict recent star formation and exhibit galaxy colours bluer than observed, but this problem is far more severe in the CHDM model which produces colours about two magnitudes too blue in B-K. Unlike in the variants of the CDM model in the CHDM case this result is not dependent on our model of stellar feedback, but is instead directly caused by the late epoch of structure formation in this model.