The relationship between galaxy and halo sizes in the Illustris and IllustrisTNG simulations

Abstract

ABSTRACT Abundance matching studies have shown that the average relationship between galaxy radius and dark matter halo virial radius remains nearly constant over many orders of magnitude in halo mass, and over cosmic time since about z = 3. In this work, we investigate the predicted relationship between galaxy radius re and halo virial radius Rh in the numerical hydrodynamical simulations Illustris and IllustrisTNG from z ∼ 0–3, and compare with the results from the abundance matching studies. We find that Illustris predicts much higher re/Rh values than the constraints obtained by abundance matching, at all redshifts, as well as a stronger dependence on halo mass. In contrast, IllustrisTNG shows very good agreement with the abundance matching constraints. In addition, at high redshift it predicts a strong dependence of re/Rh on halo mass on mass scales below those that are probed by existing observations. We present the predicted re/Rh relations from Illustris and IllustrisTNG for galaxies divided into star forming and quiescent samples, and quantify the scatter in re/Rh for both simulations. Further, we investigate whether this scatter arises from the dispersion in halo spin parameter and find no significant correlation between re/Rh and halo spin. We investigate the paths in re/Rh traced by individual haloes over cosmic time, and find that most haloes oscillate around the median re/Rh relation over their formation history.