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accepted to ApJ We present results of an attempt to include more detailed gas physics motivated from hydrodynamical simulations within semi-analytic models (SAM) of galaxy formation, focusing on the role that environmental effects play. The main difference to previous SAMs is that we include ’gravitational’ heating of the intra-cluster medium (ICM) by the net surplus of gravitational potential energy released from gas that has been stripped from infalling satellites. Gravitational heating appears to be an efficient heating source able to prevent cooling in environments corresponding to dark matter halos more massive than ∼ 10 13 M⊙. The energy release by gravitational heating can match that by AGN-feedback in massive galaxies and can exceed it in the most massive ones. However, there is a fundamental difference in the way the two processes operate. Gravitational heating becomes important at late times, when the peak activity of AGNs is already over, and it is very mass dependent. This mass dependency and time behaviour gives the right trend to recover down-sizing in the star-formation rate of massive galaxies. In general we find that environmental effects play the largest role in halos more massive than M ∗ at any given redshift because of the continued growth by mergers in these halos. We
Khochfar et al. (Fri,) studied this question.