Inconsequence of Galaxy Major Mergers in Driving Star Formation at z>1: Insights from Cosmological Simulations

Abstract: Utilizing a high-resolution (114 pc/h) adaptive mesh-refinement cosmological galaxy formation simulation of the standard cold dark matter model with a large (2000-3000 galaxies with stellar mass greater than 1e9 Msun) statistical sample, we examine the role of major mergers in driving star formation at z>1 in a cosmological setting, after validating that some of the key properties of simulated galaxies are in reasonable agreement with observations, including luminosity functions, SF history, effective sizes and damped Lyman alpha systems. We find that major mergers have a relatively modest effect on star formation, in marked contrast to previous idealized merger simulations of disk galaxies that show up to two orders of magnitude increase in star formation rate. At z=2.4-3.7, major mergers tend to increase the specific star formation rate by 10-25% for galaxies in the entire stellar mass range 10^9-10^12 Msun probed. Their effect appears to increase with decreasing redshift, but is capped at 60% at z=1.4-2.4. Two factors may account for this modest effect. First, SFR of galaxies not in major mergers are much higher at z>1 than local disk galaxy counterparts. Second, most galaxies at z>1 have small sizes and contain massive dense bulges, which suppress the merger induced structural effects and gas inflow enhancement. Various other predictions are also made that will provide verifiable tests of the model.