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Published March 1, 2015 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Synthetic galaxy images and spectra from the Illustris simulation

Abstract

We present our methods for generating a catalogue of 7000 synthetic images and 40 000 integrated spectra of redshift z = 0 galaxies from the Illustris simulation. The mock data products are produced by using stellar population synthesis models to assign spectral energy distributions (SED) to each star particle in the galaxies. The resulting synthetic images and integrated SEDs therefore properly reflect the spatial distribution, stellar metallicity distribution, and star formation history of the galaxies. From the synthetic data products, it is possible to produce monochromatic or colour-composite images, perform SED fitting, classify morphology, determine galaxy structural properties, and evaluate the impacts of galaxy viewing angle. The main contribution of this paper is to describe the production, format, and composition of the image catalogue that makes up the Illustris Simulation Observatory. As a demonstration of this resource, we derive galactic stellar mass estimates by applying the SED fitting code fast to the synthetic galaxy products, and compare the derived stellar masses against the true stellar masses from the simulation. We find from this idealized experiment that systematic biases exist in the photometrically derived stellar mass values that can be reduced by using a fixed metallicity in conjunction with a minimum galaxy age restriction.

Additional Information

© 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2014 December 2; received 2014 November 28; in original form 2014 July 21. We thank the referee for a constructive report which has helped to improve the quality of this paper.We thank Dave Sanders and Arjun Dey for helpful suggestions on this work. We thank Patrik Jonsson for his significant efforts to write, develop, and support the SUNRISE code. GS acknowledges support from the HST grants programme, number HST- AR-12856.01-A. Support for programme #12856 (PI Lotz) was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. CCH is grateful to the Klaus Tschira Foundation for financial support and acknowledges the hospitality of the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by the National Science Foundation Grant No. PHY-1066293. VS acknowledges support by the DFG Research Centre SFB-881 TheMilkyWay System through project A1, and by the European Research Council under ERC-StG EXAGAL-308037. LH acknowledges support from NASA grant NNX12AC67G and NSF grant AST-1312095. The computations in this paper were run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science, Research Computing Group at Harvard University. We thank Paul Edmon and the FAS RC team for their technical support.

Attached Files

Published - MNRAS-2015-Torrey-2753-71.pdf

Submitted - 1411.3717v1.pdf

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August 22, 2023
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October 23, 2023