Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation
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 due to numerical inaccuracies and incomplete physical models. Moreover, because of computational constraints, 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 volume of . It yields a reasonable population of ellipticals and spirals, reproduces the distribution of galaxies in clusters and statistics of hydrogen on large scales, and at the same time the metal and hydrogen content of galaxies on small scales.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1405.1418,
title = {Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation},
author = {Mark Vogelsberger and Shy Genel and Volker Springel and Paul Torrey and Debora Sijacki and Dandan Xu and Gregory F. Snyder and Simeon Bird and Dylan Nelson and Lars Hernquist},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.1418},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
32 pages, 5 figures, Nature Article (May 8, 2014). The official Illustris website can be found at http://www.illustris-project.org