Effects of simulated cosmological magnetic fields on the galaxy population

Abstract

We investigate the effects of varying the intensity of the primordial magnetic seed field on the global properties of the galaxy population in ideal magnetohydrodynamic cosmological simulations performed with the moving-mesh code arepo. We vary the seed field in our calculations in a range of values still compatible with the current cosmological upper limits. We show that above a critical intensity of ≃10⁻⁹ G, the additional pressure arising from the field strongly affects the evolution of gaseous structures, leading to a suppression of the cosmic star formation history, which is stronger for larger seed fields. This directly reflects into a lower total galaxy count above a fixed stellar mass threshold at all redshifts, and a lower galaxy number density at fixed stellar mass and a less massive stellar component at fixed virial mass at all mass scales. These signatures may be used, in addition to the existing methods, to derive tighter constraints on primordial magnetic seed field intensities.