Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 486, Issue 3, Pages 3134-3179Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz968
Keywords
globular clusters: general; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: formation; galaxies: haloes; galaxies: star formation
Categories
Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [KR4801/1-1]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme via the ERC Starting Grant MUSTANG [714907]
- ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme via the ERC Consolidator Grant Multi-Pop [646928]
- LJMU's Faculty of Engineering and Technology
- STFC capital grants [ST/H008519/1, ST/K00087X/1]
- STFCDiRAC Operations grant [ST/K003267/1]
- Durham University
- BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant [ST/K00042X/1]
- DFG [Sonderforschungsbereich SFB 881]
- Royal Society
- STFC [ST/R000832/1, ST/T001550/1, ST/T001348/1, ST/T001569/1, ST/R001014/1, ST/M006948/1, ST/M007073/1, ST/R001006/1, ST/R001049/1, ST/M007618/1, ST/R00689X/1, ST/T001372/1, ST/S002529/1, ST/M007065/1, ST/M007006/1] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present 25 cosmological zoom-in simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies in the 'MOdelling Star cluster population Assembly In Cosmological Simulations within EAGLE' (E-MOSAICS) project. E-MOSAICS couples a detailed physical model for the formation, evolution, and disruption of star clusters to the EAGLE galaxy formation simulations. This enables following the co-formation and co-evolution of galaxies and their star cluster populations, thus realizing the long-standing promise of using globular clusters (GCs) as tracers of galaxy formation and assembly. The simulations show that the age-metallicity distributions of GC populations exhibit strong galaxy-to-galaxy variations, resulting from differences in their evolutionary histories. We develop a formalism for systematically constraining the assembly histories of galaxies using GC age-metallicity distributions. These distributions are characterized through 13 metrics that we correlate with 30 quantities describing galaxy formation and assembly (e.g. halo properties, formation/assembly redshifts, stellar mass assembly time-scales, galaxy merger statistics), resulting in 20 statistically (highly) significant correlations. The GC age-metallicity distribution is a sensitive probe of the mass growth, metal enrichment, and minor merger history of the host galaxy. No such relation is found between GCs and major mergers, which play a sub-dominant role in GC formation for Milky-Way-mass galaxies. Finally, we show how the GC age-metallicity distribution enables the reconstruction of the host galaxy's merger tree, allowing us to identify all progenitors with masses M-* greater than or similar to 10(8) M-circle dot for redshifts 1 <= z <= 2.5. These results demonstrate that cosmological simulations of the co-formation and co-evolution of GCs and their host galaxies successfully unlock the potential of GCs as quantitative tracers of galaxy formation and assembly.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available