Papers › Morphological decomposition of TNG50 galaxies: methodology and catalogue
Morphological decomposition of TNG50 galaxies: methodology and catalogue
Tommaso Zana, Alessandro Lupi, Matteo Bonetti, Massimo Dotti, Yetli Rosas-Guevara, David Izquierdo-Villalba, Silvia Bonoli, Lars Hernquist, Dylan Nelson
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We present MORDOR (MORphological DecOmposeR, a new algorithm for structural decomposition of simulated galaxies based on stellar kinematics. The code measures the properties of up to five structural components (a thin/cold and a thick/warm disc, a classical and a secular bulge, and a spherical stellar halo), and determines the properties of a stellar bar (if present). A comparison with other algorithms presented in the literature yields overall good agreement, with MORDOR displaying a higher flexibility in correctly decomposing systems and identifying bars in crowded environments (e.g. with ongoing fly-bys, often observable in cosmological simulations). We use MORDOR to analyse galaxies in the TNG50 simulation and find the following: (i) the thick disc component undergoes the strongest evolution in the binding energy-circularity plane, as expected when disc galaxies decrease their turbulent-rotational support with cosmic time; (ii) smaller galaxies (with stellar mass, 10⁹ ≲M_* / M_⊙ ≤5 ×10⁹) undergo a major growth in their disc components after z∼1, whereas (iii) the most massive galaxies (5 ×10¹⁰ < M_* / M_⊙ ≤5×10¹¹) evolve toward more spheroidal dominated objects down to z=0 due to frequent gravitational interactions with satellites; (iv) the fraction of barred galaxies grows rapidly at high redshift and stabilizes below z∼2, except for the most massive galaxies that show a decrease in the bar occupation fraction at low redshift; (v) galaxies with M_* ∼10¹¹ M_⊙ exhibit the highest relative occurrence of bars at z=0, in agreement with observational studies. We publicly release MORDOR and the morphological catalogue of TNG50 galaxies.
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