Bibcode
McAlpine, S.; Helly, J. C.; Schaller, M.; Trayford, J. W.; Qu, Y.; Furlong, M.; Bower, R. G.; Crain, R. A.; Schaye, J.; Theuns, T.; Dalla Vecchia, C.; Frenk, C. S.; McCarthy, I. G.; Jenkins, A.; Rosas-Guevara, Y.; White, S. D. M.; Baes, M.; Camps, P.; Lemson, G.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Computing, Volume 15, p. 72-89.
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4
2016
Citations
456
Refereed citations
433
Description
We present the public data release of halo and galaxy catalogues
extracted from the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical
simulations of galaxy formation. These simulations were performed with
an enhanced version of the GADGET code that includes a modified
hydrodynamics solver, time-step limiter and subgrid treatments of
baryonic physics, such as stellar mass loss, element-by-element
radiative cooling, star formation and feedback from star formation and
black hole accretion. The simulation suite includes runs performed in
volumes ranging from 25 to 100 comoving megaparsecs per side, with
numerical resolution chosen to marginally resolve the Jeans mass of the
gas at the star formation threshold. The free parameters of the subgrid
models for feedback are calibrated to the redshift z = 0 galaxy stellar
mass function, galaxy sizes and black hole mass-stellar mass relation.
The simulations have been shown to match a wide range of observations
for present-day and higher-redshift galaxies. The raw particle data have
been used to link galaxies across redshifts by creating merger trees.
The indexing of the tree produces a simple way to connect a galaxy at
one redshift to its progenitors at higher redshift and to identify its
descendants at lower redshift. In this paper we present a relational
database which we are making available for general use. A large number
of properties of haloes and galaxies and their merger trees are stored
in the database, including stellar masses, star formation rates,
metallicities, photometric measurements and mock gri images. Complex
queries can be created to explore the evolution of more than
105 galaxies, examples of which are provided in the Appendix.
The relatively good and broad agreement of the simulations with a wide
range of observational datasets makes the database an ideal resource for
the analysis of model galaxies through time, and for connecting and
interpreting observational datasets.