Introducing the Illustris Project: simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe

By M. Vogelsberger, Shy Genel, Volker Springel, P. Torrey, D. Sijacki, Dandan Xu, Gregory F. Snyder, D. Nelson, Lars Hernquist Mit, HarvardCfA and 3 more. 2014

1,666 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce the Illustris Project, a series of large-scale hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation. The highest resolution simulation, Illustris-1, covers a volume of $(106.5\,{\rm Mpc})^3$, has a dark mass resolution of ${6.26 \times 10^{6}\,{\rm M}_\odot}$, and an initial baryonic matter mass resolution of ${1.26 \times 10^{6}\,{\rm M}_\odot}$. At $z=0$ gravitational forces are softened on scales of $710\,{\rm pc}$, and the smallest hydrodynamical gas cells have an extent of $48\,{\rm pc}$. We follow the dynamical evolution of $2\times 1820^3$ resolution elements and in addition passively evolve $1820^3$ Monte Carlo tracer particles reaching a total particle count of more than $18$ billion. The galaxy formation model includes: primordial and metal-line cooling with self-shielding corrections, stellar evolution, stellar feedback, gas recycling, chemical enrichment, supermassive black hole growth, and feedback from active galactic nuclei. At $z=0$ our simulation volume contains about $40,000$ well-resolved galaxies covering a diverse range of morphologies and colours including early-type, late-type and irregular galaxies. The simulation reproduces reasonably well the cosmic star formation rate density, the galaxy luminosity function, and baryon conversion efficiency at $z=0$. It also qualitatively captures the impact of galaxy environment on the red fractions of galaxies. The internal velocity structure of selected well-resolved disk galaxies obeys the stellar and baryonic Tully-Fisher relation together with flat circular velocity curves. In the well-resolved regime the simulation reproduces the observed mix of early-type and late-type galaxies. Our model predicts a halo mass dependent impact of baryonic effects on the halo mass function and the masses of haloes caused by feedback from supernova and active galactic nuclei.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44528c83433fc6a859a93d82216b45a4fd007cb2

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. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. Volker Springel
4. R. Dav'e
5. Simon D. M. White
6. R. Somerville
7. C. Conroy
8. T. Naab

Citations in the corpus

• Galaxy morphology and star formation in the Illustris Simulation at z = 0 (2015, methodology): “As the density increases, the share of late-type discs shrinks smoothly, falling below 0.5 when ρ & 10 Mpc−3, while the share of early-type discs smoothly increases.”
• Size evolution of normal and compact galaxies in the EAGLE simulation (2015, methodology): “An aperture of twice the half-mass radius is used to measure the stellar masses and SFRs, as was applied in previous ILLUSTRIS publications.”
• The unexpected diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves (2015, background): “‘Baryon-induced’ cores in CDM haloes would be difficult to distinguish from those produced by other effects, such as collisional effects in the case of SIDM (see e.g. Vogelsberger et al. 2014b; Bastidas Fry et al. 2015), complicating matters further.”
• EMERGE – an empirical model for the formation of galaxies since z ∼ 10 (2017, background): “In hydrodynamical simulations the baryonic component is discretised and evolved hydrodynamically (Hirschmann et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Dubois et al. 2014; Hopkins et al. 2014; Khandai et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015), while in semi-analytic models (SAMs) it is separated from the…”
• The cosmic merger rate of stellar black hole binaries from the Illustris simulation (2017, methodology): “The Illustris-1 is the highest resolution hydrodynamical simulation run in the frame of the Illustris project (Vogelsberger et al. 2014a).”
• Cool outflows in galaxies and their implications (2020, background): “…comes from sophisticated cosmological galaxy formation simulations that incorporate the observable properties of the best-studied outflow systems (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015; Dubois et al. 2016; Choi et al. 2018; Biernacki and Teyssier 2018; Brennan et al. 2018; Hopkins et al.…”
• Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, background): “…model has provided a compelling backbone to galaxy formation theory, a field that is becoming increasingly successful at reproducing the detailed properties of galaxies, including their counts, clustering, colors, morphologies, and evolution over time (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye 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.”
• Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, methodology): “…for SPH, the Sijacki et al. (2007) AGN feedback model has also been used in recent large scale simulations with the moving mesh code AREPO extended by the influence of the radiation field of the accreting black holes on the cooling rate of the gas (Sijacki et al. 2015, Vogelsberger et al. 2014).”
• Galaxies as simple dynamical systems: observational data disfavor dark matter and stochastic star formation (2014, methodology): “[161] do not discuss this discrepancy nor is [71] cited by them.”
• The energy and momentum input of supernova explosions in structured and ionized molecular clouds (2014, background): “…them cannot of do not follow the temperature structure of the ISM below temperatures of 104 K and assume the transformation of gas to stars below a relatively low density threshold (n ∼ 0.1 − 1 cm−3) representative for the ionised gas phase in the ISM (Schaye et al. 2014; Vogelsberger et al. 2014).”
• Neutral hydrogen in galaxy haloes at the peak of the cosmic star formation history (2014, result): “Recent large-volume simulations (Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015) with parameterized feedback models also contain for the first time a mixture of spiral and elliptical galaxies in qualitative agreement with observations (but with significant quantitative discrepancies; Genel et al.…”
• NIHAO project – I. Reproducing the inefficiency of galaxy formation across cosmic time with a large sample of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations (2015, methodology): “…resolution of our simulations compared to a number of state-of-the-art zoom-in (ERIS - Guedes et al. 2011; Governato et al. 2012; Aumer et al. 2013; Marinacci et al. 2014; FIRE - Hopkins et al. 2014) and large volume (ILLUSTRIS - Vogelsberger et al. 2014; EAGLE - Schaye et al. 2015) simulations.”
• The stellar mass assembly of galaxies in the Illustris simulation: growth by mergers and the spatial distribution of accreted stars (2015, methodology): “…we note that we also examined the dependence of the ex situ stellar mass fraction on galaxy overdensity (not shown), using a definition based on the distance to the 5th nearest neighbour with an r-band magnitude brighter than −19.5 (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b), but found no significant correlation.”
• First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the galaxy colour bimodality (2017, methodology): “The emergence of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations as powerfully predictive theoretical models is embodied in the recent Illustris (Vogelsberger et al. 2014a,b; Genel et al. 2014; Sijacki et al. 2015) and EAGLE (Schaye et al. 2015; Crain et al. 2015) simulations.”
• The cosmic merger rate of neutron stars and black holes (2018, methodology): “It covers a comoving volume of (106.5 Mpc)3, and has an initial dark matter and baryonic matter mass resolution of 6.26 × 106 and 1.26 × 106 M , respectively (Vogelsberger et al. 2014b,a).”
• How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, background): “…& Springel 2013; Vogelsberger et al. 2014; Schaye et al. 2015; Ford et al. 2015), although some significant discrepancies between the results of s ateof-the-art cosmological simulations and models remain (see Vogelsberger et al. 2014, Genel et al. 2014, andSchaye et al. 2015 for discussions).”