Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
We study the origin of the diffuse stellar component (DSC) in 117 galaxy clusters extracted from a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation. We identify all galaxies present in the simulated clusters at 17 output redshifts, starting with z = 3.5, and then build the family trees for all the z = 0 cluster galaxies. The most massive cluster galaxies show complex family trees, resembling the merger trees of dark matter haloes, while the majority of other cluster galaxies experience only one or two major mergers during their entire life history. Then, for each diffuse star particle identified at z = 0, we look for the galaxy to which it once belonged at an earlier redshift, thus linking the presence of the DSC to the galaxy formation history.
Murante et al. (Mon,) studied this question.