Towards a realistic population of simulated galaxy groups and clusters

By A. Brun, Ian G. McCarthy, Joop Schaye, Trevor J. Ponman. 2013

253 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new suite of large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulations called cosmo-OWLS. They form an extension to the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) project, and have been designed to help improve our understanding of cluster astrophysics and non-linear structure formation, which are now the limiting systematic errors when using clusters as cosmological probes. Starting from identical initial conditions in either the Planck or WMAP7 cosmologies, we systematically vary the most important ‘sub-grid’ physics, including feedback from supernovae and active galactic nuclei (AGN). We compare the properties of the simulated galaxy groups and clusters to a wide range of observational data, such as X-ray luminosity and temperature, gas mass fractions, entropy and density profiles, Sunyaev–Zel'dovich flux, I-band mass-to-light ratio, dominance of the brightest cluster galaxy and central massive black hole (BH) masses, by producing synthetic observations and mimicking observational analysis techniques. These comparisons demonstrate that some AGN feedback models can produce a realistic population of galaxy groups and clusters, broadly reproducing both the median trend and, for the first time, the scatter in physical properties over approximately two decades in mass (1013 M⊙ ≲ M500 ≲ 1015 M⊙) and 1.5 decades in radius (0.05 ≲ r/r500 ≲ 1.5). However, in other models, the AGN feedback is too violent (even though they reproduce the observed BH scaling relations), implying that calibration of the models is required. The production of realistic populations of simulated groups and clusters, as well as models that bracket the observations, opens the door to the creation of synthetic surveys for assisting the astrophysical and cosmological interpretation of cluster surveys, as well as quantifying the impact of selection effects.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/78ef96d0bbb7e87a65feec1e114902f487d1536b

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Citations in the corpus

Simulating galaxy formation with black hole driven thermal and kinetic feedback (2016, result): “The fact that the burstiness of the feedback has such a dramatic impact is in agreement with other works (e.g. Le Brun et al. 2014; Sijacki et al. 2015) and can in our case be explained by the fact that the velocity kicks directly determine the strength of the resulting shocks as well as the post…”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, methodology): “Recently, Le Brun et al. (2014) used the cosmo-OWLS simulation suite to conduct a systematic examination of the properties of galaxy groups in response to variation of TAGN.”
How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, methodology): “…and intergalactic media (e.g.Oppenheimer & Davé 2009; Oppenheimer et al. 2012; Davé et al. 2010; Ford et al. 2013, 2014, 2015) and X-ray observations (e.g.Cox et al. 2006; Le Brun et al. 2014; Zhang et al. 2014; Bogdán et al. 2015; Schaye et al. 2015) can be used to constrain outflow models.”
hmcode-2020: improved modelling of non-linear cosmological power spectra with baryonic feedback (2020, methodology): “The free parameters in our feedback model are constrained using data from the hydrodynamical library9 of van Daalen et al. (2020), which contains simulations from the COSMO-OWLS (Le Brun et al. 2014) and BAHAMAS10 (McCarthy et al. 2017) suites.”
KiDS-450: testing extensions to the standard cosmological model (2016, methodology): “As some of the feedback models considered in the latest OWL simulations (cosmo-OWLS; Le Brun et al. 2014) are more extreme in the violence they inflict on the matter power spectrum than those in the original OWLS models (Schaye et al. 2010; van Daalen et al. 2011), extending to low values of B is…”
COSMOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS FROM GALAXY CLUSTERS IN THE 2500 SQUARE-DEGREE SPT-SZ SURVEY (2016, methodology): “However, the mean values and widths of the priors are updated to reflect results from the more recent cosmo-OWLS hydrodynamic simulations (Le Brun et al. 2014), which will be discussed in §2.2.”
The BAHAMAS project: Calibrated hydrodynamical simulations for large-scale structure cosmology (2016, methodology): “…in the simulation, as the BH dominates the local potential after this point. down the heating temperature or heated gas mass and, as shown by Le Brun et al. (2014) (hereafter L14; see also Schaye et al. 2015), even relatively minor changes in ∆Theat can have a significant impact on the hot gas…”
The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: the importance of the hydrodynamics scheme (2015, methodology): “The values are computed by generating mock-observations of our haloes as described by Le Brun et al. (2014).”
The masses and density profiles of halos in a LCDM galaxy formation simulation (2014, background): “…a range of low-redshift observables of the galaxy population such as masses, sizes, and star formation rates (Schaye et al. 2015), although the properties of clusters of galaxies are not reproduced as well as in the COSMO-OWLS simulation (Le Brun et al. 2014) analysed by Velliscig et al. (2014).”
First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: the stellar mass content of groups and clusters of galaxies (2017, background): “At present just a handful of hydrodynamical simulations exist which are capable of accessing the realm of statistical samples of haloes more massive than 1014M and including some form of feedback from AGN (Le Brun et al. 2014; Dolag et al. 2016; McCarthy et al. 2017).”
Cluster Cosmology Constraints from the 2500 deg2 SPT-SZ Survey: Inclusion of Weak Gravitational Lensing Data from Magellan and the Hubble Space Telescope (2018, methodology): “When not including the X-ray data in our fit, however, we apply a Gaussian prior lns z=0.13±0.13 as in dH16 (this constraint was extracted from mock observations of hydrodynamic simulations from Le Brun et al. 2014).”
KiDS-450 + 2dFLenS: Cosmological parameter constraints from weak gravitational lensing tomography and overlapping redshift-space galaxy clustering (2017, background): “…(2017) and Joudaki et al. (2017b) due to a wider prior on the baryonic feedback amplitude (1 < B < 4 as compared to 2 < B < 4 previously) to better account for the ‘cosmo-OWL’ simulations (Le Brun et al. 2014), which more strongly affect the matter power spectrum than the original OWL simulations.”
Theoretical Challenges in Galaxy Formation (2016, background): “In particular it reproduces reasonable gas fractions and X-ray luminosities for galaxy groups (Choi et al. 2014, Le Brun et al. 2014, McCarthy et al. 2010) which are over-predicted by models with a constant boost factor and thermal feedback.”
The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments (2014, methodology): “The subgrid physics used in EAGLE is based on that developed for OWLS (Schaye et al. 2010), and used also in GIMIC (Crain et al. 2009) and cosmo-OWLS (Le Brun et al. 2014).”