The Impact of Splashback Galaxies on Galaxy Assembly Bias

Abstract

The clustering of galaxies is affected by the assembly history of their underlying dark matter halos. This complex phenomenon, known as galaxy assembly bias, has been extensively studied, but the exact physical origin remains unclear. Splashback halos, typically low-mass halos that have traversed larger neighboring halos, have been suggested to be associated with halo assembly bias. Using a semi-analytic galaxy-formation model applied to the Millennium simulation, we explicitly explore the role that splasback galaxies play in galaxy assembly bias. We identify splashbacks as present-day central galaxies that were formerly satellites of a more massive host, and construct stellar-mass selected galaxy samples with the splashbacks either removed or reclassified as satellites of their former host halo. We find that splashbacks tend to reside in low-mass, highly concentrated halos and in dense environments, and that they have relatively high stellar-to-halo mass ratios. Splashbacks appear to be largely responsible for the low-mass tail of the occupancy variation for highly concentrated halos and for halos in dense environments. Finally, when computing the impact of assembly bias on galaxy clustering, we find that while removing the splashbacks significantly reduces the signal, reassigning them has little effect on its amplitude but shifts the transition scale. We repeat the analysis with the hydrodynamical simulation TNG300, confirming the robustness of our results. Our results provide insight into assembly bias and have potential implications for modeling the galaxy-halo connection.