First results from the IllustrisTNG simulations: radio haloes and magnetic fields

By F. Marinacci, M. Vogelsberger, Rüdiger Pakmor, P. Torrey, Volker Springel, L. Hernquist, D. Nelson, R. Weinberger, A. Pillepich, Jill P. Naiman and 1 more. Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2017

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We introduce the IllustrisTNG project, a new suite of cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulations performed with the moving-mesh code AREPO employing an updated Illustris galaxy formation model. Here we focus on the general properties of magnetic fields and the diffuse radio emission in galaxy clusters. Magnetic fields are prevalent in galaxies, and their build-up is closely linked to structure formation. We find that structure formation amplifies the initial seed fields ($10^{-14}$ comoving Gauss) to the values observed in low-redshift galaxies ($1-10\,\mu{\rm G}$). The magnetic field topology is closely connected to galaxy morphology such that irregular fields are hosted by early-type galaxies, while large-scale, ordered fields are present in disc galaxies. Using two simple models for the energy distribution of relativistic electrons we predict the diffuse radio emission of $280$ clusters with a baryonic mass resolution of $1.1\times 10^{7}\,{\rm M_{\odot}}$, and generate mock observations for VLA, LOFAR, ASKAP and SKA. Our simulated clusters show extended radio emission, whose detectability correlates with their virial mass. We reproduce the observed scaling relations between total radio power and X-ray emission, $M_{500}$, and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich $Y_{\rm 500}$ parameter. The radio emission surface brightness profiles of our most massive clusters are in reasonable agreement with VLA measurements of Coma and Perseus. Finally, we discuss the fraction of detected extended radio haloes as a function of virial mass and source count functions for different instruments. Overall our results agree encouragingly well with observations, but a refined analysis requires a more sophisticated treatment of relativistic particles in large-scale galaxy formation simulations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a64fa14fe0a7c69ce5f6cc1eceac1ecf579e1525

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Citations in the corpus

The IllustrisTNG simulations: public data release (2018, background): “…across the galaxy size-mass plane (Genel et al. 2018) and exhibit systematically diﬀerent column densities of OVI ions (Nelson et al. 2018b) and diﬀerent magnetic-ﬁeld strengths (Nelson et al. 2018a) at ﬁxed galaxy stellar mass, as well as diﬀerent magnetic-ﬁeld topologies (Marinacci et al. 2018).”
The star formation activity of IllustrisTNG galaxies: main sequence, UVJ diagram, quenched fractions, and systematics (2018, background): “…star formation activity of galaxies produced in the state-ofthe-art cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of The Next Generation Illustris project (hereafter IllustrisTNG or TNG: Naiman et al. 2018; Marinacci et al. 2018; Springel et al. 2018; Pillepich et al. 2018b; Nelson et al. 2018a).”
Open Questions in Cosmic-Ray Research at Ultrahigh Energies (2019, background): “…structure formation can also provide complementary information and possibly improve the current picture (Pakmor et al., 2014; Pakmor et al., 2017; Marinacci et al., 2018) or alternatively FIGURE 13 | Illustration of pure GZK scenarios (free injection index, maximum energy ﬁxed at 10 22 eV, ﬁrst…”
First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, methodology): “The IllustrisTNG project (Pillepich et al. 2018b; Naiman et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2018a; Marinacci et al. 2018; Springel et al. 2018) is a recent addition to this class of simulation.”
The optical morphologies of galaxies in the IllustrisTNG simulation: a comparison to Pan-STARRS observations (2018, methodology): “The IllustrisTNG Project (Marinacci et al. 2018; Naiman et al. 2018; Nelson et al. 2018; Pillepich et al. 2018b; Springel et al. 2018) is a suite of magneto-hydrodynamic cosmological simulations run with the moving-mesh code AREPO (Springel 2010; Pakmor et al. 2011, 2016), featuring an updated…”