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Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation

Nature volume 509, pages 177–182 (2014)Cite this article

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Abstract

Previous simulations of the growth of cosmic structures have broadly reproduced the ‘cosmic web’ of galaxies that we see in the Universe, but failed to create a mixed population of elliptical and spiral galaxies, because of numerical inaccuracies and incomplete physical models. Moreover, they were unable to track the small-scale evolution of gas and stars to the present epoch within a representative portion of the Universe. Here we report a simulation that starts 12 million years after the Big Bang, and traces 13 billion years of cosmic evolution with 12 billion resolution elements in a cube of 106.5 megaparsecs a side. It yields a reasonable population of ellipticals and spirals, reproduces the observed distribution of galaxies in clusters and characteristics of hydrogen on large scales, and at the same time matches the ‘metal’ and hydrogen content of galaxies on small scales.

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Figure 1: Mock images of the simulated galaxy population.
Figure 2: Projected number density profile of satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters.
Figure 3: Neutral hydrogen and metal content of galaxies as a function of their stellar mass.
Figure 4: Large-scale characteristics of neutral hydrogen.
Figure 5: Nonlinear matter power spectrum.

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Acknowledgements

V.S. acknowledges support from the DFG Research Centre SFB-881 ‘The Milky Way System’ through project A1, and from the European Research Council under ERC-StG EXAGAL-308037. G.S. acknowledges support from the HST grants programme, no. HST-AR-12856.01-A. Support for program no. 12856 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. L.H. acknowledges support from NASA grant NNX12AC67G and NSF grant AST-1312095. D.X. acknowledges support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. S.B. was supported by NSF grant AST-0907969. The Illustris simulation was run on the CURIE supercomputer at CEA/France as part of PRACE project RA0844, and the SuperMUC computer at the Leibniz Computing Centre, Germany, as part of GCS-project pr85je. Further simulations were run on the Harvard Odyssey and CfA/ITC clusters, the Ranger and Stampede supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center through XSEDE, and the Kraken supercomputer at Oak Rridge National Laboratory through XSEDE. Figure 1b is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). These observations were associated with programs 9,352, 9,425, 9,488, 9,575, 9,793, 9,978, 10,086, 10,189, 10,258, 10,340, 10,530, 11,359, 11,563, 12,060, 12,061, 12,062, 12,099 and 12,177, and compiled for the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field data release version 1.0 (http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/xdf/). Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX13AC07G and by other grants and contracts.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    M. Vogelsberger

  2. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    S. Genel, P. Torrey, D. Nelson & L. Hernquist

  3. Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 35, 69118 Heidelberg, Germany ,

    V. Springel & D. Xu

  4. Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, ARI, Mönchhofstrasse 12-14, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany ,

    V. Springel

  5. Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and Institute of Astronomy, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK ,

    D. Sijacki

  6. Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, USA

    G. Snyder

  7. Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, 08540, New Jersey, USA

    S. Bird

Authors
  1. M. Vogelsberger
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  2. S. Genel
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  3. V. Springel
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  5. D. Sijacki
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  6. D. Xu
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  9. D. Nelson
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  10. L. Hernquist
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Contributions

M.V., L.H., D.S., V.S. and S.G. conceived and planned the project. M.V., S.G., D.S. and P.T. developed the galaxy formation model. V.S. developed the AREPO code. M.V. generated initial conditions. V.S., M.V. and S.G. ran the simulations. M.V. performed the main analysis. G.S. and P.T. constructed the mock images. S.B. provided statistics of the inter-galactic medium. D.X. and D.N. provided post-processing tools. M.V., S.G., V.S., P.T. and L.H. interpreted the results. M.V. and S.G. wrote the manuscript with contributions from co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to M. Vogelsberger.

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Vogelsberger, M., Genel, S., Springel, V. et al. Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation. Nature 509, 177–182 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13316

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