Constraining the Star Formation Histories in Dark Matter Halos: I. Central Galaxies

Understand

Using the self-consistent modeling of the conditional stellar mass functions across cosmic time by Yang et al.

• (2012), we make model predictions for the star formation histories (SFHs) of {\it central} galaxies in halos of different masses.
• The model requires the following two key ingredients: (i) mass assembly histories of central and satellite galaxies, and (ii) local observational constraints of the star formation rates of central galaxies as function of halo mass.
• We obtain a universal fitting formula that describes the (median) SFH of central galaxies as function of halo mass, galaxy stellar mass and redshift.