The illustris simulation: Public data release

By D. Nelson, A. Pillepich, Shy Genel, M. Vogelsberger, Volker Springel, P. Torrey, V. Rodriguez-Gomez, D. Sijacki, Gregory F. Snyder, Brendan Griffen and 5 more. Astronomy and Computing, 2015

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We present the full public release of all data from the Illustris simulation project. Illustris is a suite of large volume, cosmological hydrodynamical simulations run with the moving-mesh code Arepo and including a comprehensive set of physical models critical for following the formation and evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. Each simulates a volume of (106.5 Mpc)^3 and self-consistently evolves five different types of resolution elements from a starting redshift of z=127 to the present day, z=0. These components are: dark matter particles, gas cells, passive gas tracers, stars and stellar wind particles, and supermassive black holes. This data release includes the snapshots at all 136 available redshifts, halo and subhalo catalogs at each snapshot, and two distinct merger trees. Six primary realizations of the Illustris volume are released, including the flagship Illustris-1 run. These include three resolution levels with the fiducial "full" baryonic physics model, and a dark matter only analog for each. In addition, we provide four distinct, high time resolution, smaller volume "subboxes". The total data volume is ~265 TB, including ~800 full volume snapshots and ~30,000 subbox snapshots. We describe the released data products as well as tools we have developed for their analysis. All data may be directly downloaded in its native HDF5 format. Additionally, we release a comprehensive, web-based API which allows programmatic access to search and data processing tasks. In both cases we provide example scripts and a getting-started guide in several languages: currently, IDL, Python, and Matlab. This paper addresses scientific issues relevant for the interpretation of the simulations, serves as a pointer to published and on-line documentation of the project, describes planned future additional data releases, and discusses technical aspects of the release.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/416f1d59425c41afe358cc0181ff7bab1dd170fa

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Citations in the corpus

The optical morphologies of galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation: a comparison to Pan-STARRS observations (2018, methodology): “We also use data from the original Illustris simulation (Vogelsberger et al. 2014a,b; Genel et al. 2014; Sijacki et al. 2015; Nelson et al. 2015), which follows the evolution of 2 × 18203 resolution elements within a periodic cube measuring 75h−1 ≈ 106.5 Mpc per side, with a baryonic mass…”
The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation (2017, background): “More details on the Illustris can be found in the presentation papers (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b,a), in the release paper (Nelson et al. 2015) and on the aforementioned website.”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the stellar mass content of groups and clusters of galaxies (2017, background): “…Genel et al. 2014) and improves upon Illustris by 1) extending the mass range of the simulated galaxies and haloes, 2) adopting an improved numerical and astrophysical modelling, and 3) addressing the identified shortcomings of the previous generation simulations (summarized in Nelson et al. 2015).”
THE SFR–M* RELATION AND EMPIRICAL STAR FORMATION HISTORIES FROM ZFOURGE AT 0.5 < z < 4 (2015, result): “Comparison to Simulations In Figure 6, we compare our measured SFR−M∗ relations for the full sample of galaxies with results from the recent Illustris hydrodynamic simulation (Nelson et al. 2015) and the Munich semi-analytic galaxy formation model (Henriques et al. 2014).”
Simulating galaxy formation with the IllustrisTNG model (2017, methodology): “1010.7M ); and 6) galaxy color distributions without a strong bimodality between red and blue galaxies as observed (see Nelson et al. 2015, for a full compendium).”
Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, methodology): “For ILLUSTRIS (Vogelsberger et al. 2014), the half-mass radii, stellar masses and SFRs were obtained from their public data release (Nelson et al. 2015).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, methodology): “We use the Illustris simulations (Genel et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014a,b; Nelson et al. 2015; Sijacki et al. 2015) to estimate the impact of baryonic effects for CMASS-like samples.”
The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, methodology): “The Illustris-1 is the highest resolution hydrodynamical simulation run in the frame of the Illustris project (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b,a; Nelson et al. 2015).”
Massive Black Hole Binary Mergers in Dynamical Galactic Environments (2016, methodology): “Finally, the data for the Illus- tris simulations, and auxiliary files containing the black hole data1 used for this analysis, have been made publicly available online (www.illustris-project.org; Nelson et al. 2015).”
The star formation activity of IllustrisTNG galaxies: main sequence, UVJ diagram, quenched fractions, and systematics (2018, background): “…the original Illustris project (Vogelsberger et al. 2013; Torrey et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014b; Genel et al. 2014; Sijacki et al. 2015; Nelson et al. 2015) by including, among others, a new black-hole feedback model, magnetohydrodynamics, and a new scheme for galactic winds (see…”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: matter and galaxy clustering (2017, neutral): “…assign to the simulated galaxies and which are used in various cuts to select sub-samples are based on the measured stellar mass within twice the stellar half-mass radius of each sub-halo, as described in more detail in the documentation of our public data release of Illustris (Nelson et al. 2015).”
The stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: growth by mergers and the spatial distribution of accreted stars (2015, methodology): “The g and r magnitudes are based on the sum of the luminosities of all the stellar particles in the subhalo (see Nelson et al. 2015, for more details).”