Probing Galaxy Evolution in Massive Clusters Using ACT and DES: Splashback as a Cosmic Clock

Abstract

We measure the projected number density profiles of galaxies and the splashback feature in clusters selected by the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect from the Advanced Atacama Cosmology Telescope (AdvACT) survey using galaxies observed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The splashback radius is consistent with CDM-only simulations and is located at 2.4_(-0.4)^(+0.3) Mpc h⁻¹. We split the galaxies on color and find significant differences in their profile shapes. Red and green-valley galaxies show a splashback-like minimum in their slope profile consistent with theory, while the bluest galaxies show a weak feature at a smaller radius. We develop a mapping of galaxies to subhalos in simulations and assign colors based on infall time onto their hosts. We find that the shift in location of the steepest slope and different profile shapes can be mapped to the average time of infall of galaxies of different colors. The steepest slope traces a discontinuity in the phase space of dark matter halos. By relating spatial profiles to infall time, we can use splashback as a clock to understand galaxy quenching. We find that red galaxies have on average been in clusters over 3.2 Gyr, green galaxies about 2.2 Gyr, while blue galaxies have been accreted most recently and have not reached apocenter. Using the full radial profiles, we fit a simple quenching model and find that the onset of galaxy quenching occurs after a delay of about a gigayear and that galaxies quench rapidly thereafter with an exponential timescale of 0.6 Gyr.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 September 10; revised 2021 May 30; accepted 2021 June 10; published 2021 December 8. We thank Arka Banerjee, Peter Behroozi, Benedikt Diemer, and Andrey Kravtsov for illuminating discussions and reviewing early drafts of the paper. We thank the anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. This work was supported in part by the US Department of Energy contract to SLAC no. DE-AC02-76SF00515 and made use of computational resources at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a US Department of Energy Office, and the Sherlock cluster at the Stanford Research Computing Center (SRCC); the authors are thankful for the support of the SLAC and SRCC computing teams. The CosmoSim database used in this paper is a service by the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). The MultiDark database was developed in cooperation with the Spanish MultiDark Consolider Project CSD2009-00064. J.P.H. acknowledges funding for SZ cluster studies from NSF grant number AST-1615657. N.S. acknowledges support from NSF grant numbers AST-1513618 and AST-1907657. This paper has gone through internal review by the DES collaboration and the ACT collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the DOE and NSF(USA), MEC/MICINN/MINECO (Spain), STFC (UK), HEFCE (UK). NCSA (UIUC), KICP (U. Chicago), CCAPP (Ohio State), MIFPA (Texas A&M), CNPQ, FAPERJ, FINEP (Brazil), DFG (Germany), and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne Lab, UC Santa Cruz, University of Cambridge, CIEMAT-Madrid, University of Chicago, University College London, DES-Brazil Consortium, University of Edinburgh, ETH Zürich, Fermilab, University of Illinois, ICE (IEEC-CSIC), IFAE Barcelona, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, LMU München and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, University of Michigan, NFS's NOIRLab, University of Nottingham, Ohio State University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Lab, Stanford University, University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, and the OzDES Membership Consortium. Based in part on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory at NSF's NOIRLab (NOIRLab Prop. ID 2012B-0001; PI: J. Frieman), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The DES Data Management System is supported by the NSF under grant Nos. AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MICINN under grants ESP2017-89838, PGC2018-094773, PGC2018-102021, SEV-2016-0588, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Brazilian Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia (INCT) do e-Universo (CNPq grant 465376/2014-2). This manuscript has been authored by Fermi Research Alliance, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC02-07CH11359 with the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, and Office of High Energy Physics. The ACT project is supported by the US National Science Foundation through awards AST-1440226, AST-0965625, and AST-0408698, as well as awards PHY-1214379 and PHY-0855887. Funding was also provided by Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) award to UBC. ACT operates in the Parque Astronómico Atacama in northern Chile under the auspices of the Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica de Chile (CONICYT). Computations were performed on the GPC supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium and on the hippo cluster at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. SciNet is funded by the CFI under the auspices of Compute Canada, the Government of Ontario, the Ontario Research Fund—Research Excellence, and the University of Toronto. The development of multichroic detectors and lenses was supported by NASA grants NNX13AE56G and NNX14AB58G.

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