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 Mpc)3, has a dark ...mass resolution of 6.26 × 106 M⊙, and an initial baryonic matter mass resolution of 1.26 × 106 M⊙. At z = 0 gravitational forces are softened on scales of 710 pc, and the smallest hydrodynamical gas cells have an extent of 48 pc. We follow the dynamical evolution of 2 × 18203 resolution elements and in addition passively evolve 18203 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. Here we describe the simulation suite, and contrast basic predictions of our model for the present-day galaxy population with observations of the local universe. 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 disc 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.
Abstract
We present the new TNG50 cosmological, magnetohydrodynamical simulation – the third and final volume of the IllustrisTNG project. This simulation occupies a unique combination of large ...volume and high resolution, with a 50 Mpc box sampled by 21603 gas cells (baryon mass of 8 × 104 M⊙). The median spatial resolution of star-forming interstellar medium gas is ∼100−140 pc. This resolution approaches or exceeds that of modern ‘zoom’ simulations of individual massive galaxies, while the volume contains ∼20 000 resolved galaxies with $M_\star \gtrsim 10^7$ M⊙. Herein we show first results from TNG50, focusing on galactic outflows driven by supernovae as well as supermassive black hole feedback. We find that the outflow mass loading is a non-monotonic function of galaxy stellar mass, turning over and rising rapidly above 1010.5 M⊙ due to the action of the central black hole (BH). The outflow velocity increases with stellar mass, and at fixed mass it is faster at higher redshift. The TNG model can produce high-velocity, multiphase outflows that include cool, dense components. These outflows reach speeds in excess of 3000 km s−1 out to 20 kpc with an ejective, BH-driven origin. Critically, we show how the relative simplicity of model inputs (and scalings) at the injection scale produces complex behaviour at galactic and halo scales. For example, despite isotropic wind launching, outflows exhibit natural collimation and an emergent bipolarity. Furthermore, galaxies above the star-forming main sequence drive faster outflows, although this correlation inverts at high mass with the onset of quenching, whereby low-luminosity, slowly accreting, massive BHs drive the strongest outflows.
ABSTRACT
We use the high-resolution TNG50 cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulation to explore the properties and origin of cold circumgalactic medium (CGM) gas around massive galaxies (M⋆ > 1011 ...M⊙ ) at intermediate redshift ($z \sim 0.5$). We discover a significant abundance of small-scale, cold gas structure in the CGM of ‘red and dead’ elliptical systems, as traced by neutral H i and Mg ii. Halos can host tens of thousands of discrete absorbing cloudlets, with sizes of order a kpc or smaller. With a Lagrangian tracer analysis, we show that cold clouds form due to strong $\delta \rho / \bar{\rho } \gg 1$ gas density perturbations that stimulate thermal instability. These local overdensities trigger rapid cooling from the hot virialized background medium at ∼107 K to radiatively inefficient ∼104 K clouds, which act as cosmologically long-lived, ‘stimulated cooling’ seeds in a regime where the global halo does not satisfy the classic tcool/tff < 10 criterion. Furthermore, these small clouds are dominated by magnetic rather than thermal pressure, with plasma β ≪ 1, suggesting that magnetic fields may play an important role. The number and total mass of cold clouds both increase with resolution, and the mgas ≃ 8 × 104 M⊙ cell mass of TNG50 enables the ∼ few hundred pc, small-scale CGM structure we observe to form. Finally, we make a preliminary comparison against observations from the COS-LRG, LRG-RDR, COS-Halos, and SDSS LRG surveys. We broadly find that our recent, high-resolution cosmological simulations produce sufficiently high covering fractions of extended, cold gas as observed to surround massive galaxies.
We present an overview of galaxy evolution across cosmic time in the Illustris simulation. Illustris is an N-body/hydrodynamical simulation that evolves 2 × 18203 resolution elements in a (106.5 ...Mpc)3 box from cosmological initial conditions down to z = 0 using the arepo moving-mesh code. The simulation uses a state-of-the-art set of physical models for galaxy formation that was tuned to reproduce the z = 0 stellar mass function and the history of the cosmic star formation rate density. We find that Illustris successfully reproduces a plethora of observations of galaxy populations at various redshifts, for which no tuning was performed, and provide predictions for future observations. In particular, we discuss (a) the buildup of galactic mass, showing stellar mass functions and the relations between stellar mass and halo mass from z = 7 to 0, (b) galaxy number density profiles around massive central galaxies out to z = 4, (c) the gas and total baryon content of both galaxies and their haloes for different redshifts, and as a function of mass and radius, and (d) the evolution of galaxy specific star formation rates up to z = 8. In addition, we (i) present a qualitative analysis of galaxy morphologies from z = 5 to 0, for the stellar as well as the gaseous components, and their appearance in Hubble Space Telescope mock observations, (ii) follow galaxies selected at z = 2 to their z = 0 descendants, and quantify their growth and merger histories, and (iii) track massive z = 0 galaxies to high redshift and study their joint evolution in star formation activity and compactness. We conclude with a discussion of several disagreements with observations, and lay out possible directions for future research.
We study the properties of black holes and their host galaxies across cosmic time in the Illustris simulation. Illustris is a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulation which resolves a ...(106.5 Mpc)3 volume with more than 12 billion resolution elements and includes state-of-the-art physical models relevant for galaxy formation. We find that the black hole mass density for redshifts z = 0–5 and the black hole mass function at z = 0 predicted by Illustris are in very good agreement with the most recent observational constraints. We show that the bolometric and hard X-ray luminosity functions of active galactic nuclei (AGN) at z = 0 and 1 reproduce observational data very well over the full dynamic range probed. Unless the bolometric corrections are largely underestimated, this requires radiative efficiencies to be on average low, ϵr ≲ 0.1, noting however that in our model radiative efficiencies are degenerate with black hole feedback efficiencies. Cosmic downsizing of the AGN population is in broad agreement with the findings from X-ray surveys, but we predict a larger number density of faint AGN at high redshifts than currently inferred. We also study black hole–host galaxy scaling relations as a function of galaxy morphology, colour and specific star formation rate. We find that black holes and galaxies co-evolve at the massive end, but for low mass, blue and star-forming galaxies there is no tight relation with either their central black hole masses or the nuclear AGN activity.
Abstract
The distribution of elements in galaxies provides a wealth of information about their production sites and their subsequent mixing into the interstellar medium. Here we investigate the ...elemental distributions of stars in the IllustrisTNG simulations. We analyse the abundance ratios of magnesium and europium in Milky Way-like galaxies from the TNG100 simulation (stellar masses log (M⋆/M⊙) ∼ 9.7–11.2). Comparison of observed magnesium and europium for individual stars in the Milky Way with the stellar abundances in our more than 850 Milky Way-like galaxies provides stringent constraints on our chemical evolutionary methods. Here, we use the magnesium-to-iron ratio as a proxy for the effects of our SNII (core-collapse supernovae) and SNIa (Type Ia supernovae) metal return prescription and as a comparison to a variety of galactic observations. The europium-to-iron ratio tracks the rare ejecta from neutron star–neutron star mergers, the assumed primary site of europium production in our models, and is a sensitive probe of the effects of metal diffusion within the gas in our simulations. We find that europium abundances in Milky Way-like galaxies show no correlation with assembly history, present-day galactic properties, and average galactic stellar population age. We reproduce the europium-to-iron spread at low metallicities observed in the Milky Way, and find it is sensitive to gas properties during redshifts z ≈ 2–4. We show that while the overall normalization of Eu/Fe is susceptible to resolution and post-processing assumptions, the relatively large spread of Eu/Fe at low Fe/H when compared to that at high Fe/H is quite robust.
Abstract
The IllustrisTNG project is a new suite of cosmological magnetohydrodynamical simulations of galaxy formation performed with the arepo code and updated models for feedback physics. Here, we ...introduce the first two simulations of the series, TNG100 and TNG300, and quantify the stellar mass content of about 4000 massive galaxy groups and clusters (1013 ≤ M200c/M⊙ ≤ 1015) at recent times (z ≤ 1). The richest clusters have half of their total stellar mass bound to satellite galaxies, with the other half being associated with the central galaxy and the diffuse intracluster light. Haloes more massive than about 5 × 1014 M⊙ have more diffuse stellar mass outside 100 kpc than within 100 kpc, with power-law slopes of the radial mass density distribution as shallow as the dark matter's ( − 3.5 ≲ α3D ≲ −3). Total halo mass is a very good predictor of stellar mass, and vice versa: at z = 0, the 3D stellar mass measured within 30 kpc scales as ∝(M500c)0.49 with a ∼0.12 dex scatter. This is possibly too steep in comparison to the available observational constraints, even though the abundance of The Next Generation less-massive galaxies ( ≲ 1011 M⊙ in stars) is in good agreement with the measured galaxy stellar mass functions at recent epochs. The 3D sizes of massive galaxies fall too on a tight (∼0.16 dex scatter) power-law relation with halo mass, with $r^{\rm stars}_{\rm 0.5} \propto (M_{\rm 200c})^{0.53}$. Even more fundamentally, halo mass alone is a good predictor for the whole stellar mass profiles beyond the inner few kiloparsecs, and we show how on average these can be precisely recovered given a single-mass measurement of the galaxy or its halo.
Abstract
We select galaxies from the IllustrisTNG hydrodynamical simulations ($M_{\rm stars}\gt 10^9 \, {\rm M}_\odot$ at 0 ≤ z ≤ 2) and characterize the shapes and evolutions of their UVJ and star ...formation rate–stellar mass (SFR–Mstars) diagrams. We quantify the systematic uncertainties related to different criteria to classify star-forming versus quiescent galaxies, different SFR estimates, and by accounting for the star formation measured within different physical apertures. The TNG model returns the observed features of the UVJ diagram at z ≤ 2, with a clear separation between two classes of galaxies. It also returns a tight star-forming main sequence (MS) for $M_{\rm stars}\lt 10^{10.5} \, ({\rm M}_\odot)$ with a ∼0.3 dex scatter at z ∼ 0 in our fiducial choices. If a UVJ-based cut is adopted, the TNG MS exhibits a downwardly bending at stellar masses of about 1010.5−10.7 M⊙. Moreover, the model predicts that ${\sim }80\, (50)$ per cent of 1010.5−11 M⊙ galaxies at z = 0 (z = 2) are quiescent and the numbers of quenched galaxies at intermediate redshifts and high masses are in better agreement with observational estimates than previous models. However, shorter SFR-averaging time-scales imply higher normalizations and scatter of the MS, while smaller apertures lead to underestimating the galaxy SFRs: overall we estimate the inspected systematic uncertainties to sum up to about 0.2−0.3 dex in the locus of the MS and to about 15 percentage points in the fraction of quenched galaxies. While TNG colour distributions are clearly bimodal, this is not the case for the SFR logarithmic distributions in bins of stellar mass (SFR ≳ 10−3 M⊙yr−1). Finally, the slope and z = 0 normalization of the TNG MS are consistent with observational findings; however, the locus of the TNG MS remains lower by about 0.2−0.5 dex at 0.75 ≤ z < 2 than the available observational estimates taken at face value.
ABSTRACT
The coevolution of galaxies and their metal content serves as an important test for galaxy feedback models. We analyse the distribution and evolution of metals within the IllustrisTNG ...simulation suite with a focus on the gas-phase mass−metallicity relation (MZR). We find that the IllustrisTNG model broadly reproduces the slope and normalization evolution of the MZR across the redshift range 0 < z < 2 and mass range 109 < M*/M⊙ < 1010.5. We make predictions for the high-redshift (2 < z < 10) metal content of galaxies which is described by a gradual decline in the normalization of the metallicity with an average high-redshift (z > 2) evolution fit by d log(Z)/dz ≈ −0.064. Our simulations indicate that the metal retention efficiency of the interstellar medium (ISM) is low: a majority of gas-phase metals (∼85 per cent at z = 0) live outside of the ISM, either in an extended gas disc, the circumgalactic medium, or outside the halo. Nevertheless, the redshift evolution in the simulated MZR normalization is driven by the higher gas fractions of high-redshift galaxies, not by changes to the metal retention efficiency. The scatter in the simulated MZR contains a clear correlation with the gas-mass or star formation rate of the system, in agreement with the observed fundamental metallicity relation. The scatter in the MZR is driven by a competition between periods of enrichment- and accretion-dominated metallicity evolution. We expect that while the normalization of the MZR declines with redshift, the slope of the correlation between metallicity and gas-mass at fixed stellar mass is not a strong function of redshift. Our results indicate that the gas fraction dependence of ‘regulator’ style models allows them to simultaneously explaining the shape, redshift evolution, and existence of correlated scatter with gas fraction about the MZR.
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