Time Evolution of Galaxy Formation and Bias in Cosmological Simulations

Michael Blanton, Renyue Cen, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, Michael A. Strauss, Max Tegmark

Published 1999-03-11Version 1

The clustering of galaxies relative to the mass distribution declines with time because: first, nonlinear peaks become less rare events; second, the densest regions stop forming new galaxies because gas there becomes too hot to cool and collapse; third, after galaxies form, they are gravitationally ``debiased'' because their velocity field is the same as the dark matter. To show these effects, we perform a hydrodynamic cosmological simulation and examine the density field of recently formed galaxies as a function of redshift. We find the bias b_* of recently formed galaxies (the ratio of the rms fluctuations of these galaxies and mass), evolves from 4.5 at z=3 to around 1 at z=0, on 8 h^{-1} Mpc comoving scales. The correlation coefficient r_* between recently formed galaxies and mass evolves from 0.9 at z=3 to 0.25 at z=0. As gas in the universe heats up and prevents star formation, star-forming galaxies become poorer tracers of the mass density field. After galaxies form, the linear continuity equation is a good approximation to the gravitational debiasing, even on nonlinear scales. The most interesting observational consequence of the simulations is that the linear regression of the star-formation density field on the galaxy density field evolves from about 0.9 at z=1 to 0.35 at z=0. These effects also provide a possible explanation for the Butcher-Oemler effect, the excess of blue galaxies in clusters at redshift z ~ 0.5. Finally, we examine cluster mass-to-light ratio estimates of Omega, finding that while Omega(z) increases with z, one's estimate Omega_est(z) decreases. (Abridged)