Resolving cosmic structure formation with the Millennium-II simulation

By M. Boylan-Kolchin, Volker Springel, Simon D. M. White, Adrian Jenkins, Gerard Lemson Mpa, Durham, ARI-ZAH, Mpe. 2009

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We present the Millennium-II Simulation (MS-II), a very large N-body simulation of dark matter evolution in the concordance A cold dark matter (ACDM) cosmology. The MS-II assumes the same cosmological parameters and uses the same particle number and output data structure as the original Millennium Simulation (MS), but was carried out in a periodic cube one-fifth the size (100 h - 1 Mpc) with five times better spatial resolution (a Plummer equivalent softening of 1.0 h -1 kpc) and with 125 times better mass resolution (a particle mass of 6.9 x 10 6 h -1 M ⊙ ). By comparing results at MS and MS-II resolution, we demonstrate excellent convergence in dark matter statistics such as the halo mass function, the subhalo abundance distribution, the mass dependence of halo formation times, the linear and non-linear autocorrelations and power spectra, and halo assembly bias. Together, the two simulations provide precise results for such statistics over an unprecedented range of scales, from haloes similar to those hosting Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies to haloes corresponding to the richest galaxy clusters. The 'Milky Way' haloes of the Aquarius Project were selected from a lower resolution version of the MS-II and were then resimulated at much higher resolution. As a result, they are present in the MS-II along with thousands of other similar mass haloes. A comparison of their assembly histories in the MS-II and in resimulations of 1000 times better resolution shows detailed agreement over a factor of 100 in mass growth. We publicly release halo catalogues and assembly trees for the MS-II in the same format within the same archive as those already released for the MS.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ccc90349be11f43726513f2aae1b607336b5107

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Citations in the corpus

The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way (2016, methodology): “The relationship betweenM∗ and Mv was determined by ‘abundance matching’ of the galaxy stellar masses found byLi & White (2009) with the halo virial masses found in the Millennium simulations (Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009).”
Galactic stellar haloes in the CDM model (2009, methodology): “The Aquarius haloes were selected from a lower resolution version of the Millennium-II simulation (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009) and individually resimulated using a multi-mass particle (‘zoom’) technique.”
THE ARECIBO LEGACY FAST ALFA SURVEY. X. THE H i MASS FUNCTION AND FROM THE 40% ALFALFA SURVEY (2010, neutral): “Current dark matter simulations and models (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Jenkins et al. 2001) imply that the faint-end slope of the underlying mass function is α ∼ −1.8, in agreement with the Press-Schechter analysis of cosmic structure formation (Press & Schechter 1974), but observational evidence…”
Galactic Searches for Dark Matter (2012, background): “scales of modern simulations. The two largest volume cosmological simulations to date that resolve a statistical sample of Milky Way-mass halos identify approximately 104 halos with mass near 1012 M (Boylan-Kolchin et al., 2009; Klypin et al., 2011). Due to the particle resolution of a few times 108”
Dark Matter: A Primer (2010, background): “89× 106 h−1M in a volume of (100 h−1 Mpc)3 to study dark matter halo structure and formation [23].”
Scaling relations for galaxy clusters in the Millennium-XXL simulation (2012, methodology): “The MXXL adopts a ΛCDM cosmology with the same cosmological parameters and output times as the previous two Millennium simulations (Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009).”
The current status of galaxy formation (2012, methodology): “Guo et al. (2010) used this third approach (called subhalo abundance matching or SHAM, and pioneered independently by Vale & Ostriker, 2006 and Conroy et al., 2006), to determine the galaxy formation efficiency mstars/Mhalo as a function of Mhalo, by matching the observed stellar mass function with ”
Evidence for Significant Growth in the Stellar Mass of Brightest Cluster Galaxies over the Past 10 Billion Years (2012, positive): “Fakhouri et al. (2010), who use the Millennium and Millennium II simulations (Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009), and Wechsler et al. (2002), who use an independent simulation (Bullock et al. 2001), find similar growth rates.”
Halo and subhalo demographics with Planck cosmological parameters: Bolshoi–Planck and MultiDark–Planck simulations (2016, background): “…cosmological dark matter simulations that are particularly useful for studying galaxy hosts include the Millennium simulations (Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Angulo et al. 2012), Bolshoi (Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2011), MultiDark (Prada et al. 2012; Riebe et al.…”
LoCuSS: THE SLOW QUENCHING OF STAR FORMATION IN CLUSTER GALAXIES AND THE NEED FOR PRE-PROCESSING (2015, background): “In ΛCDM models structure formation occurs hierarchically, meaning that as the most massive collapsed structures in the universe, galaxy clusters form latest and are also the most dynamically immature (e.g., Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Gao et al. 2012).”
The Milky Way’s bright satellites as an apparent failure of ΛCDM (2011, methodology): “The abundance matching relation itself is computed by equating subhalo abundances from the Millennium and Millennium-II Simulations (closely following Guo et al. 2010) to galaxy abundances from the SDSS (Li & White 2009), with a power-law extrapolation to lower halo masses.”
Numerical simulations of the dark universe: State of the art and the next decade (2012, methodology): “Millennium-II [87]) have been used to make predictions for both the amplitude of such a signal and the level of its anisotropies [88], and these have been confronted with current Fermi data [89].”
Halo concentrations in the standard LCDM cosmology (2011, methodology): “For Mvir = 10 12h−1M⊙ in the MS-II and Aquarius simulations Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2009) give concentration of cvir = 12.9, which is 1.3 times larger than what we get from Bolshoi.”
Towards a more realistic population of bright spiral galaxies in cosmological simulations (2013, methodology): “The Aquarius haloes are a suite of high resolution zoomin resimulations of regions chosen from the Millenium II simulation (Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009) which follows a cosmological box of a side-length 137 Mpc.”
There's no place like home? Statistics of Milky Way-mass dark matter haloes (2009, methodology): “The simulation is described fully in Boylan-Kolchin et al. (2009).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release (2015, background): “Since then simulations have grown and such comparisons have turned increasingly more quantitative (see e.g. Klypin et al. 2003; Springel et al. 2005; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2009; Klypin, Trujillo-Gomez & Primack 2011).”