Subhalo abundance matching using progenitor mass at varying redshift: two modes of stellar mass growth imprinted into the Subaru HSC galaxy clustering

Abstract

ABSTRACT We propose a novel subhalo abundance matching (SHAM) model that uses the virial mass of the main progenitor of each (sub)halo Mprog as a proxy of the galaxy stellar mass M* at the time of observation. This Mprog model predicts the two-point correlation functions depending on the choice of the epoch zprog at which Mprog is quoted. With zprog as a fitting parameter, we apply the Mprog model to the angular correlation functions measured with varying stellar mass thresholds from M*, lim/(h−2 M⊙) = 1011–108.6 using a sample of galaxies at z ≃ 0.4 from the Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam survey. The Mprog model can reproduce the observations very well over 10 h−1kpc–10 h−1Mpc. We find that, for the samples of 109.2 ≤ M*, lim/(h−2 M⊙) ≤ 1010.2, the correlation functions predicted by the widely used Vpeak model lack amplitudes at ≲1 h−1 Mpc, suggesting that Mprog is a better proxy of the galaxy stellar mass than conventional Vpeak. The zprog parameter is highest (zprog ≃ 3) for intermediate mass galaxies at M* ≃ 109.9 h−2 M⊙, and becomes smaller down to zprog ≃ 1 for both lower and higher mass galaxies. We interpret these trends as reflecting the downsizing in the in situ star formation in lower mass galaxies and the larger contribution of the ex situ stellar mass growth in higher mass galaxies.