The significance of galaxy mergers in stellar mass growth as a function of galaxy and halo mass

As theoretical and empirical studies have pointed out, galaxy mergers play a pivotal role in galaxy mass assembly histories. Its contribution is considered to be more significant in more massive galaxies. In order to quantitatively understand the origin of stellar components in galaxies, we investigated stellar mass assembly histories as a function of galaxy and halo mass using semi-analytic approaches. In this study, we found that the most massive galaxies (log $M/M_{\odot}$ ~ 11.75 at z = 0), which are mostly the brightest cluster galaxies, obtain roughly 70% of their stellar components via mergers. The role of mergers monotonically declines with galaxy mass: less than 20% for log $M/M_{\odot}$ = 10.75 at z = 0. The contribution of galaxy mergers to stellar mass growth decays more slowly than that of in-situ star formation. Therefore, merger accretion becomes a dominant channel for stellar mass growth of the most massive group since z~2. However, when it comes to central galaxies in haloes less massive than $10^{13}_{\odot}$, star formation is always dominant.