The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme

By Matthieu Schaller, Claudio Dalla Vecchia, Joop Schaye, Richard G. Bower, Tom Theuns, Robert A. Crain, Michelle Furlong, I. G. M. Icc, D. University, I. R. U. D. L. Laguna and 2 more. 2015

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We present results from a subset of simulations from the "Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments" (EAGLE) suite in which the formulation of the hydrodynamics scheme is varied. We compare simulations that use the same subgrid models without re-calibration of the parameters but employing the standard GADGET flavour of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) instead of the more recent state-of-the-art ANARCHY formulation of SPH that was used in the fiducial EAGLE runs. We find that the properties of most galaxies, including their masses and sizes, are not significantly affected by the details of the hydrodynamics solver. However, the star formation rates of the most massive objects are affected by the lack of phase mixing due to spurious surface tension in the simulation using standard SPH. This affects the efficiency with which AGN activity can quench star formation in these galaxies and it also leads to differences in the intragroup medium that affect the X-ray emission from these objects. The differences that can be attributed to the hydrodynamics solver are, however, likely to be less important at lower resolution. We also find that the use of a time step limiter is important for achieving the feedback efficiency required to match observations of the low-mass end of the galaxy stellar mass function.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

The Auriga Project: the properties and formation mechanisms of disc galaxies across cosmic time (2016, methodology): “…method, such as pressure-based SPH (Read, Hayfield & Agertz 2010; Saitoh & Makino 2013) and the inclusion of artificial thermal conductivity, have improved the situation somewhat, particularly with regard to the mixing and hydrodynamical instabilities (Agertz et al. 2011; Schaller et al. 2015b).”
The eagle simulations of galaxy formation: Public release of halo and galaxy catalogues (2015, methodology): “, see also Appendix A of Schaye et al. (2015) and Schaller et al. (2015a)), and use the C2 kernel of Wendland (1995), the pressure-entropy formulation of SPH of Hopkins (2013), the time-step limiters introduced by Durier and Dalla Vecchia (2012), the artificial viscosity switch of Cullen and Dehnen…”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, background): “; see also Appendix A of S15) and the impact of their inclusion on the galaxy population was explored by Schaller et al. (2015).”
The APOSTLE simulations: solutions to the Local Group's cosmic puzzles (2015, methodology): “In agreement with Sawala et al. (2013) and Schaller et al. (2015a), we find that while the more massive haloes of vmax > 100 km s−1, such as those that host the MW and M31 are not significantly affected by baryonic effects, the haloes of dwarf galaxies end up being less massive than their DMO…”
Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, background): “…but other aspects of the model, such as the star formation rates (SFRs; Schaye et al. 2015), galaxy colours (Trayford et al. 2015), rotation curves (Schaller et al. 2015b), the gas content of galaxies (Lagos et al. 2015; Bahé et al. 2016), and the intergalactic hydrogen and metal absorption lines…”
A case study of hurdle and generalized additive models in astronomy: the escape of ionizing radiation (2018, methodology): “…et al. 2011; Johnson, Dalla Vecchia & Khochfar 2013) with molecular cooling functions for H2 and HD, a thermal SN II feedback model (Dalla Vecchia & Schaye 2012), and a time-step limiter algorithm to preserve the concordance of feedback methods (Durier & Dalla Vecchia 2012; Schaller et al. 2015).”
The dark nemesis of galaxy formation : why hot haloes trigger black hole growth and bring star formation to an end (2016, methodology): “The simulations use advanced smoothed particle hydrodynamics (ANARCHY, Schaller et al. (2015)), based on the Gadget code (Springel 2005), and phenomenological subgrid models to capture unresolved physics including cooling, metal enrichment and energy input from stellar feedback and black hole…”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, methodology): “…& Quinn 2004) code or the GADGET (Springel 2005) code and include updated implementations to treat the mixing problem better (see e.g. Hopkins et al. 2014; Hu et al. 2014; Read & Hayfield 2012; Schaller et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015; Wadsley, Veeravalli & Couchman 2008 and references therein).”
MUFASA: Galaxy Formation Simulations With Meshless Hydrodynamics (2016, unknown): “We also note that the details of SPH scheme can matter, and differences can arise when injecting energy using SPH owing to the man- c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 ner in which energy or entropy is smoothed among neighbors (Schaller et al. 2015).”
Cold gas stripping in satellite galaxies: from pairs to clusters (2016, methodology): “The latter means that it is not straightforward to estimate how much the cold gas fractions may be affected in the Schaller et al. (2015) simulations, and instead direct testing is necessary in the future.”