CosmoDC2: A Synthetic Sky Catalog for Dark Energy Science with LSST
Abstract
This paper introduces cosmoDC2, a large synthetic galaxy catalog designed to support precision dark energy science with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). CosmoDC2 is the starting point for the second data challenge (DC2) carried out by the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (LSST DESC). The catalog is based on a trillion-particle, 4.225 Gpc^3 box cosmological N-body simulation, the `Outer Rim' run. It covers 440 deg^2 of sky area to a redshift of z=3 and is complete to a magnitude depth of 28 in the r-band. Each galaxy is characterized by a multitude of properties including stellar mass, morphology, spectral energy distributions, broadband filter magnitudes, host halo information and weak lensing shear. The size and complexity of cosmoDC2 requires an efficient catalog generation methodology; our approach is based on a new hybrid technique that combines data-driven empirical approaches with semi-analytic galaxy modeling. A wide range of observation-based validation tests has been implemented to ensure that cosmoDC2 enables the science goals of the planned LSST DESC DC2 analyses. This paper also represents the official release of the cosmoDC2 data set, including an efficient reader that facilitates interaction with the data.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1907.06530,
title = {CosmoDC2: A Synthetic Sky Catalog for Dark Energy Science with LSST},
author = {Danila Korytov and Andrew Hearin and Eve Kovacs and Patricia Larsen and Esteban Rangel and Joseph Hollowed and Andrew J. Benson and Katrin Heitmann and Yao-Yuan Mao and Anita Bahmanyar and Chihway Chang and Duncan Campbell and Joseph Derose and Hal Finkel and Nicholas Frontiere and Eric Gawiser and Salman Habib and Benjamin Joachimi and François Lanusse and Nan Li and Rachel Mandelbaum and Christopher Morrison and Jeffrey A. Newman and Adrian Pope and Eli Rykoff and Melanie Simet and Chun-Hao To and Vinu Vikraman and Risa H. Wechsler and Martin White},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.06530},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
27 pages, 17 figures, submitted to APJS