Within the current standard cosmological scenario, galaxies form and evolve within dark matter haloes. It is well established that the formation and growth of galaxies across cosmic time depend on the properties of dark matter halos. Understanding the main drivers that connect galaxies to their dark matter haloes is fundamental to galaxy formation models and to constraining cosmological models using galaxy surveys. In the last couple of years, I have worked in different aspects of the "galaxy-dark matter halo connection" by using hydrodynamical cosmological simulations. Here I summarize some of my main results.
In Artale et al. (2018), we investigated the occupancy variations, i.e., how the halo occupation depends on formation time and environment of the dark matter haloes, at fixed halo mass. In this work we use the galaxy and dark matter catalogues from EAGLE and Illustris simulations. Our results show that low-mass haloes in the densest environment are more likely to host a massive central galaxy, than those in low-dense environments. We also find that early-formed haloes host more massive galaxies than late-formed haloes.Â
Left panel: Halo occupation distribution (HOD) for the 20% oldest and 20% youngest haloes at a fixed halo mass (red and blue lines, respectively). Black lines represent the HOD using the full selected sample, based on a number density threshold on 0.01 h^3/Mpc^3
Right panel: Halo occupation distribution for the 20% haloes in the high and low dense regions at a fixed halo mass (red and blue lines, respectively).