English

The ASTRID Simulation at z=0: from Massive Black Holes to Large-scale Structure

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2025-10-17 v1

Abstract

We present the z=0z=0 results for the cosmological simulation ASTRID. Hosting 2×550032\times 5500^3\approx 0.33 trillion particles in a box of 370Mpc370\, {\rm Mpc} per side, ASTRID is one of the largest cosmological hydrodynamic simulations evolved to z=0z=0. ASTRID features a large population of massive black holes (MBHs), covering a wide mass range 4×1042×1011 M4\times10^{4}\sim 2\times 10^{11}\ M_{\odot}. The adopted dynamical friction model provides a relatively accurate description of MBH dynamics, making ASTRID a powerful tool to study MBH growth and mergers in a cosmological context. ASTRID successfully captures the co-evolution of MBHs and their host galaxies, producing MBHMM_{\rm BH}-M_{\star} and MBHσM_{\rm BH}-\sigma relations in good agreement with observations. Notably, ASTRID generates scatter in these relations that is more consistent with observations than previous simulations, indicating a more realistic MBH diversity. The galaxy stellar mass function at z=0z=0 is generally consistent with observational constraints. When dust attenuation is applied, the galaxy luminosity function also agrees well with observations, and the bimodality in galaxy colors is reproduced as well. ASTRID hosts a large population of massive galaxy groups and clusters: 7 halos have M200c>1015 MM_{\rm 200c}>10^{15}\ M_{\odot}, and 9709 halos have M200c>1013 MM_{\rm 200c}>10^{13}\ M_{\odot}. We quantify the stellar mass content in these halos, and find that the correlations between the stellar and halo mass match well with observational constraints. Finally, we present the z=0z=0 power spectra of MBH and galaxies, as well as their bias with respect to the matter power spectrum. We find that MBHs with MBH108 MM_{\rm BH}\geq 10^{8}\ M_{\odot} and galaxies with M1010.5 MM_{\star}\geq 10^{10.5}\ M_{\odot} serve as good tracers of large-scale structure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.13976,
  title  = {The ASTRID Simulation at z=0: from Massive Black Holes to Large-scale Structure},
  author = {Yihao Zhou and Tiziana Di Matteo and Simeon Bird and Rupert Croft and Yueying Ni and Yanhui Yang and Nianyi Chen and Patrick Lachance and Xiaowen Zhang and Fatemeh Hafezianzadeh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13976},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Submitted to ApJ, comments are welcome