Published
A new method to quantify environment and model ram-pressure stripping in N-body simulations

Reza Ayromlou, Dylan Nelson, Rob Yates, Guinevere Kauffmann, Simon White

We introduce a local background environment (LBE) estimator that can be measured in and around every galaxy or its dark matter subhalo in high-resolution cosmological simulations. The LBE is designed to capture the influence of environmental effects such as ram-pressure stripping (RPS) on the formation and evolution of galaxies in semi-analytical models. We define the LBE directly from the particle data within an adaptive spherical shell, and devise a Gaussian mixture estimator to separate background particles from previously unidentified subhalo particles.