Mining the Information Content of Member Galaxies in Halo Mass Modeling

Abstract Motivated by previous findings that the magnitude gap between certain satellite galaxies and the central galaxy can be used to improve the estimation of halo mass, we carry out a systematic study of the information content of different member galaxies in the modeling of the host halo mass using a machine-learning approach. We employ data from the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG and train a random forest algorithm to predict a halo mass from the stellar masses of its member galaxies. Exhaustive feature selection is adopted to disentangle the importance of different galaxy members. We confirm that an additional satellite does improve the halo mass estimation compared to that estimated by the central alone. However, the magnitude of this improvement does not differ significantly using different satellite galaxies. When three galaxies are used in the halo mass prediction, the best combination is always that of the central galaxy with the most massive satellite and the smallest satellite. Furthermore, among the top seven galaxies, the combination of a central galaxy and two or three satellite galaxies gives a near-optimal estimation of halo mass, and further addition of galaxies does not raise the precision of the prediction. We demonstrate that these dependences can be understood from the shape variation of the conditional satellite distribution, with different member galaxies accounting for distinct halo-dependent features in different parts of the cumulative stellar mass function.