The relationship between galaxy and halo sizes in the Illustris and IllustrisTNG simulations

Abundance matching studies have shown that the average relationship between galaxy radius and dark matter halo virial radius remains nearly constant over many orders of magnitude in halo mass, and over cosmic time since about z = 3. In this work, we investigate the predicted relationship between galaxy radius r_e and halo virial radius R_h in the numerical hydrodynamical simulations Illustris and IllustrisTNG from z ~ 0-3, and compare with the results from the abundance matching studies. We find that Illustris predicts much higher r_e/R_h values than the constraints obtained by abundance matching, at all redshifts, as well as a stronger dependence on halo mass. In contrast, IllustrisTNG shows very good agreement with the abundance matching constraints. In addition, at high redshift it predicts a strong dependence of r_e/R_h on halo mass on mass scales below those that are probed by existing observations. We present the predicted r_e/R_h relations from Illustris and IllustrisTNG for galaxies divided into star forming and quiescent samples, and quantify the scatter in r_e/R_h for both simulations. Further, we investigate whether this scatter arises from the dispersion in halo spin parameter and find no significant correlation between r_e/R_h and halo spin. We investigate the paths in r_e/R_h traced by individual haloes over cosmic time, and find that most haloes oscillate around the median r_e/R_h relation over their formation history.