Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 439, Issue 1, Pages 264-283Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stt2410
Keywords
stars: AGB and post-AGB; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: formation
Categories
Funding
- BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant [ST/K00042X/1]
- STFC [ST/H008519/1]
- STFC DiRAC Operations grant [ST/K003267/1]
- Durham University
- Durham STFC rolling grant in theoretical cosmology
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche OMEGA [ANR-11-JS56-003-01]
- Royal Astronomical Society Grant
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/K00042X/1, ST/I001166/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/I00162X/1, ST/M007006/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- STFC [ST/M007006/1, ST/K00042X/1, ST/H008519/1, ST/I00162X/1, ST/I001166/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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We present a new release of the GALFORM semi-analytical model of galaxy formation and evolution, which exploits a Millennium Simulation-class N-body run performed with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 7 cosmology. We use this new model to study the impact of the choice of stellar population synthesis (SPS) model on the predicted evolution of the galaxy luminosity function. The semi-analytical model is run using seven different SPS models. In each case, we obtain the rest-frame luminosity function in the far-ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared (NIR) wavelength ranges. We find that both the predicted rest-frame ultraviolet and optical luminosity function are insensitive to the choice of SPS model. However, we find that the predicted evolution of the rest-frame NIR luminosity function depends strongly on the treatment of the thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stellar phase in the SPS models, with differences larger than a factor of 2 for model galaxies brighter than M-AB(K) - 5 log h < -22 (similar to L-* for 0 <= z <= 1.5). We have also explored the predicted number counts of galaxies, finding remarkable agreement between the results with different choices of SPS model, except when selecting galaxies with very red optical-NIR colours. The predicted number counts of these extremely red galaxies appear to be more affected by the treatment of star formation in discs than by the treatment of TP-AGB stars in the SPS models.
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