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Realistic simulations of galaxy formation in f(R) modified gravity

Nature Astronomy volume 3, pages 945–954 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

Future astronomical surveys will gather information that will allow gravity to be tested on cosmological scales, where general relativity is currently poorly constrained. We present a set of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations that follow galaxy formation in f(R) modified gravity models and are dedicated to finding observational signatures to help distinguish general relativity from alternatives using this information. The simulations employ the IllustrisTNG model and a new modified gravity solver in AREPO, allowing the interplay of baryonic feedback and modified gravity to be studied in the same simulation, and the degeneracy between them in the matter power spectrum to be resolved. We find that the neutral hydrogen power spectrum is suppressed substantially in f(R) gravity, which allows this model to be constrained using upcoming data from the Square Kilometre Array. Disk galaxies can form in our f(R) gravity simulations, even in the partially screened regime, and their galaxy stellar properties are only mildly affected. We conclude that modified gravity allows the formation of realistic galaxies and leaves observable signatures on large scales.

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Fig. 1: Edge- and face-on views of four different, randomly selected disk galaxies from our simulations.
Fig. 2: The relative effects of modified gravity and baryonic feedback on the total matter power spectrum.
Fig. 3: The three-dimensional matter power spectrum of the different matter components.
Fig. 4: The stellar and gaseous properties of galaxies.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The simulation code AREPO21 is currently not publicly available. The analysis scripts used to analyse the simulation output can be made available to the reader on request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the IllustrisTNG collaboration for allowing us to use their baryonic model to carry out the simulations presented in this work. We are grateful to V. Springel and R. Weinberger for their help with the AREPO code and for discussions on the results, and to A. Benitez-Llambay for making Py-SPHViewer52 available. Special thanks to C. Frenk and J. He for their comments on the results. The work described in this paper is supported by the European Research Council through an ERC Starting Grant (ERC-StG-716532-PUNCA). B.L. is additionally supported by STFC consolidated grants ST/P000541/1 and ST/L00075X/1. The cosmological simulations described in this work were run on the DiRAC Data Centric System at Durham University, UK, operated by the Institute for Computational Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). This equipment was funded by BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant ST/K00042X/1, STFC capital grants ST/H008519/1 and ST/K00087X/1, STFC DiRAC operations grant ST/K003267/1 and Durham University. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Computational Cosmology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Christian Arnold, Matteo Leo & Baojiu Li

  2. Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology, Department of Physics, Durham University, Durham, UK

    Matteo Leo

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Contributions

C.A. and B.L. planned the project. C.A. developed, implemented and optimized (together with B.L.) the modified gravity solver AREPO, ran the simulations and performed the main part of the analysis. M.L. performed the analysis for the H i power spectrum. C.A., B.L. and M.L. interpreted the results. C.A. wrote the manuscript with contributions from M.L. and B.L.

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Correspondence to Christian Arnold.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information: Nature Astronomy thanks Simeon Bird, Bridget Falck and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Fig. 1 and Supplementary references 1–6.

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Arnold, C., Leo, M. & Li, B. Realistic simulations of galaxy formation in f(R) modified gravity. Nat Astron 3, 945–954 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0823-y

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