The eagle simulations of galaxy formation: Public release of halo and galaxy catalogues

By S. McAlpine, John C. Helly, Matthieu Schaller, James W. Trayford, Yan Qu, Michelle Furlong, Richard G. Bower, Robert A. Crain, Joop Schaye, Tom Theuns and 9 more. Astronomy and Computing, 2015

346 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the public data release of halo and galaxy catalogues extracted from the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation. These simulations were performed with an enhanced version of the GADGET code that includes a modified hydrodynamics solver, time-step limiter and subgrid treatments of baryonic physics, such as stellar mass loss, element-by-element radiative cooling, star formation and feedback from star formation and black hole accretion. The simulation suite includes runs performed in volumes ranging from 25 to 100 comoving megaparsecs per side, with numerical resolution chosen to marginally resolve the Jeans mass of the gas at the star formation threshold. The free parameters of the subgrid models for feedback are calibrated to the redshift z=0 galaxy stellar mass function, galaxy sizes and black hole mass - stellar mass relation. The simulations have been shown to match a wide range of observations for present-day and higher-redshift galaxies. The raw particle data have been used to link galaxies across redshifts by creating merger trees. The indexing of the tree produces a simple way to connect a galaxy at one redshift to its progenitors at higher redshift and to identify its descendants at lower redshift. In this paper we present a relational database which we are making available for general use. A large number of properties of haloes and galaxies and their merger trees are stored in the database, including stellar masses, star formation rates, metallicities, photometric measurements and mock gri images. Complex queries can be created to explore the evolution of more than 10^5 galaxies, examples of which are provided in appendix. (abridged)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b3fe40cf9988ac25bee4def0c3b94f44337eb5d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Hernquist
2. M. Vogelsberger
3. Volker Springel
4. Shy Genel
5. P. Torrey
6. D. Nelson
7. F. Marinacci
8. A. Pillepich

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Volker Springel
2. L. Hernquist
3. Shy Genel
4. P. Torrey
5. B. Diemer
6. Rüdiger Pakmor
7. M. Vogelsberger

In Instrumentation

1. L. Hernquist
2. M. Vogelsberger
3. Volker Springel
4. Shy Genel
5. D. Nelson
6. P. Torrey
7. F. Marinacci
8. A. Pillepich

Citations in the corpus

• Impact of supermassive black hole growth on star formation (2017, background): “N is to reduce star formation rates of high mass galaxies as well as to reduce the overall number of massive galaxies. Note that error bars are smaller than the data points in most cases[90]. database[92]). Averages are only calculated for stellar mass bins containing more than 15 galaxies. These tw”
• Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, neutral): “A full description of the trees is presented by Qu et al. (2017), with their public release1 discussed by McAlpine et al. (2016).”
• The IllustrisTNG simulations: public data release (2018, methodology): “With respect to Illustris, the most comparable in simulation type, data complexity, and scientific scope is the recent public data release of the Eagle simulation, described in (McAlpine et al. 2016) (see also Camps et al.”