FIREbox: simulating galaxies at high dynamic range in a cosmological volume

Creators: Feldmann, Robert; Quataert, Eliot; Faucher-Giguère, Claude-André; Hopkins, Philip F.; Çatmabacak, Onur; Kereš, Dušan; Bassini, Luigi; Bernardini, Mauro; Bullock, James S.; Cenci, Elia; Gensior, Jindra; Liang, Lichen; Moreno, Jorge; Wetzel, Andrew

Abstract

We introduce a suite of cosmological volume simulations to study the evolution of galaxies as part of the Feedback in Realistic Environments project. FIREbox, the principal simulation of the present suite, provides a representative sample of galaxies (∼1000 galaxies with Mₛₜₐᵣ > 10⁸ M_⊙ at z = 0) at a resolution (Δx ~ 20 pc, m_b ~ 6 x 10⁴ M_⊙) comparable to state-of-the-art galaxy zoom-in simulations. FIREbox captures the multiphase nature of the interstellar medium in a fully cosmological setting (L = 22.1 Mpc) thanks to its exceptionally high dynamic range (≳10⁶) and the inclusion of multichannel stellar feedback. Here, we focus on validating the simulation predictions by comparing to observational data. We find that star formation rates, gas masses, and metallicities of simulated galaxies with Mₛₜₐᵣ < 10^(10.5-11) M_⊙) broadly agree with observations. These galaxy scaling relations extend to low masses (Mₛₜₐᵣ ~ 10⁷ M_⊙) and follow a (broken) power-law relationship. Also reproduced are the evolution of the cosmic HI density and the HI column density distribution at z ∼ 0–5. At low z , FIREbox predicts a peak in the stellar-mass–halo-mass relation but also a higher abundance of massive galaxies and a higher cosmic star formation rate density than observed, showing that stellar feedback alone is insufficient to reproduce the properties of massive galaxies at late times. Given its high resolution and sample size, FIREbox offers a baseline prediction of galaxy formation theory in a ΛCDM Universe while also highlighting modelling challenges to be addressed in next-generation galaxy simulations.

Additional Information

© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The authors thank the referee for insightful comments that helped to improve the paper. RF thanks Oliver Hahn, Marcel van Daalen, and Jose Oñorbe for help with MUSIC and CAMB. RF acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. PP00P2_157591, PP00P2_194814, and 200021_188552). EQ was supported in part by a Simons Investigator grant from the Simons Foundation and NSF AST grant 2107872. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1715216, AST-2108230, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grants 17-ATP17-006 7 and 21-ATP21-0036; by STScI through grants HST-AR-16124.001-A and HST-GO-16730.016-A; by CXO through grant TM2-23005X; and by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement through a Cottrell Scholar Award. Support for PFH was provided by NSF Research Grants 1911233, 20009234, 2108318, NSF CAREER grant 1455342, NASA grants 80NSSC18K0562, HST-AR-15800. Numerical calculations were run on the allocations AST21010 and AST20016 supported by the NSF and TACC, and NASA HEC SMD-16-7592. DK was supported by the NSF Grant AST-2108314. LB, MB, and EC acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (PP00P2_194814, 200021_188552). JSB was supported by NSF grant AST-1910346. JG gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no CRSII5_193826). JM is funded by the Hirsch foundation. Sabbatical leave support for JM was provided by Pomona College and the Harry and Grace Steele Foundation. AW received support from NSF via CAREER award AST-2045928 and grant AST-2107772; NASA ATP grant 80NSSC20K0513; HST grants AR-15809, GO-15902, GO-16273 from STScI. We acknowledge PRACE for awarding us access to MareNostrum at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain. This research was partly carried out via the Frontera computing project at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Frontera is made possible by National Science Foundation award OAC-1818253. This work was supported in part by a grant from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) under project IDs s697 and s698. We acknowledge access to Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Switzerland, under the University of Zurich's share with the project ID uzh18. This work made use of infrastructure services provided by S3IT (www.s3it.uzh.ch), the Service and Support for Science IT team at the University of Zurich. All plots were created with the MATPLOTLIB library for visualization with PYTHON (Hunter 2007). This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. DATA AVAILABILITY. The data supporting the plots within this article are available on reasonable request to the corresponding author. A public version of the GIZMO code is available at http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/GIZMO.html. FIRE data releases are publicly available at http://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire.

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