The Physical and Photometric Properties of High-Redshift Galaxies in Cosmological Hydrodynamic Simulations

Abstract

We study the physical and photometric properties of galaxies at z=4 in cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of a lambda-CDM universe. We focus on galaxies satisfying the GOODS "B-dropout" criteria. Our goals are: (1) to study the nature of high-redshift galaxies; (2) to test the simulations against published measurements of high-redshift galaxies; (3) to find relations between photometric measurements by HST/ACS (0.4 -- 1 micron) and Spitzer/IRAC (3.6 -- 8 micron) and the intrinsic physical properties of GOODS "B-dropouts" such as stellar mass, stellar age, dust reddening, and star-formation rate; and (4) to assess how representative the GOODS survey is at this epoch. Our simulations predict that high-redshift galaxies show strong correlations in star formation rate versus stellar mass, and weaker correlations versus environment and age, such that GOODS galaxies are predicted to be the most massive, most rapidly star-forming galaxies at that epoch, living preferentially in dense regions. The simulated rest-frame UV luminosity function (LF) and integrated luminosity density are in broad agreement with observations at z~4. The predicted rest-frame optical (observed 3.6 micron) LF is similar to the rest-frame UV LF, shifted roughly one magnitude brighter. We predict that GOODS detects less than 50% of the total stellar mass density formed in galaxies more massive than 10^8.7 M_sun by z=4, mainly because of brightness limits in the HST/ACS bands. The most rapidly star forming galaxies in our simulations have rates exceeding 1000 M_sun yr^-1, similar to observed sub-mm galaxies. The star formation rates of these galaxies show at most a mild excess (2--3x) over the rates that would be expected for their stellar mass. Whether these bright galaxies would be observable as LBGs depends on the uncertain effects of dust reddening.