The BAHAMAS project: Calibrated hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure cosmology

By Ian G. McCarthy, Joop Schaye, Simeon Bird, A. Brun. 2016

293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The evolution of the large-scale distribution of matter is sensitive to a variety of fundamental parameters that characterise the dark matter, dark energy, and other aspects of our cosmological framework. Since the majority of the mass density is in the form of dark matter that cannot be directly observed, to do cosmology with large-scale structure one must use observable (baryonic) quantities that trace the underlying matter distribution in a (hopefully) predictable way. However, recent numerical studies have demonstrated that the mapping between observable and total mass, as well as the total mass itself, are sensitive to unresolved feedback processes associated with galaxy formation, motivating explicit calibration of the feedback efficiencies. Here we construct a new suite of large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (called BAHAMAS, for BAryons and HAloes of MAssive Systems) where subgrid models of stellar and Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) feedback have been calibrated to reproduce the present-day galaxy stellar mass function and the hot gas mass fractions of groups and clusters in order to ensure the effects of feedback on the overall matter distribution are broadly correct. We show that the calibrated simulations reproduce an unprecedentedly wide range of properties of massive systems, including the various observed mappings between galaxies, hot gas, total mass, and black holes, and represent a significant advance in our ability to mitigate the primary systematic uncertainty in most present large-scale structure tests.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09640f433f14e8179bcda63403649ad7e03db3ad

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmological constraints from cosmic shear two-point correlation functions with HSC survey first-year data (2019, background): “…on small scales, is affected by baryon physics such as gas cooling, star formation, and supernova and active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedbacks (Schaye et al. 2010; van Daalen et al. 2011; Mead et al. 2015; Hellwing et al. 2016; McCarthy et al. 2017; Springel et al. 2018; Chisari et al. 2018).”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the stellar mass content of groups and clusters of galaxies (2017, background): “At present just a handful of hydrodynamical simulations exist which are capable of accessing the realm of statistical samples of haloes more massive than 1014M and including some form of feedback from AGN (Le Brun et al. 2014; Dolag et al. 2016; McCarthy et al. 2017).”
KiDS+VIKING-450: Cosmic shear tomography with optical and infrared data (2018, methodology): “This range of feedback is consistent with the range allowed by the more modern and well-calibrated BAHAMAS suite (McCarthy et al. 2017; Mead et al. in prep.).”
hmcode-2020: improved modelling of non-linear cosmological power spectra with baryonic feedback (2020, methodology): “Hydrodynamical simulations (e.g., the BAHAMAS of McCarthy et al. 2017) are needed, in conjunction with sub-grid recipes, to model these baryonic feedback processes.”
CMB-S4 Science Case, Reference Design, and Project Plan (2019, background): “The lines come from density and pressure profiles around such halos measured in six cosmological hydrodynamics simulations: BAHAMAS [395] (fiducial blue, “high-AGN” orange, “low-AGN” green); Battaglia et al.”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, background): “A compilation of observations from McCarthy et al. (2017) is shown as the purple hexbins.”