The Formation Mechanisms of Galaxy Tails: A Statistical and Case Study

Abstract

Using a hydrodynamical smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) zoom-in simu lation of a galaxy group, we present a set of tail identification methods, and study the statistical properties of galaxy tails and their correlations with their expected formation mechanisms. We have a sample of 4548 M > 108 M⊙ galaxies across 58 snapshots from z = 0.67 to z = 0. For each galaxy, we apply a series of velocity and density cuts to identify the tail. We observed no significant correlations between galaxy tail mass and ram pressure, though we note some issues with our sampling. Tracking four visually identified jellyfish galaxies over time showed some evidence of increased ram pressure driving ISM mass loss, as well as spikes in tail mass pre ceding spikes in ram pressure with temporal offsets ranging from 500 Myr to 2 Gyr. No correlation was found between ISM mass and tail mass. We track the tail gas of a particularly well defined jellyfish galaxy 3.2 Gyrs back in time. We find that a lower bound of 30% of the tail gas was never in the ISM. Distinguishing between former ISM tail material and never ISM-accreted tail material, we see evidence of temperature mixing with the IGM in the former. Velocity and radial trajectory maps show a sharp impulse of ∆v ≈ 50 km s−1 over 4 snapshots, affecting both the never ISM-accreted tail material and CGM material, with the former showing evidence of momentum mixing onto the former ISM material. Combined with ob servations of CGM stripping, we propose that a significant portion of galaxy tails consists of stripped CGM that got swept up into the stripped ISM