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Risa H. Wechsler

Publications and source records attributed to Risa H. Wechsler.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

The connection between the host halo and the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way

Many properties of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, including its mass assembly history, concentration, and subhalo population, remain poorly constrained. We explore the connection between these properties of the Milky Way and its satellite galaxy population, especially the implication of the presence of the Magellanic Clouds for the properties of the Milky Way halo. Using a suite of high-resolution $N$-body simulations of Milky Way-mass halos with a fixed final Mvir ~ 10^{12.1}Msun, we find that the presence of Magellanic Cloud-like satellites strongly correlates with the assembly history, concentration, and subhalo population of the host halo, such that Milky Way-mass systems with Magellanic Clouds have lower concentration, more rapid recent accretion, and more massive subhalos than typical halos of the same mass. Using a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model that is tuned to reproduce the stellar mass function of the classical dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way with Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo, we show that adopting host halos with different mass-assembly histories and concentrations can lead to different best-fit models for galaxy-formation physics, especially for the strength of feedback. These biases arise because the presence of the Magellanic Clouds boosts the overall population of high-mass subhalos, thus requiring a different stellar-mass-to-halo-mass ratio to match the data. These biases also lead to significant differences in the mass--metallicity relation, the kinematics of low-mass satellites, the number counts of small satellites associated with the Magellanic Clouds, and the stellar mass of Milky Way itself. Observations of these galaxy properties can thus provide useful constraints on the properties of the Milky Way halo.

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RHAPSODY-G simulations II - Baryonic growth and metal enrichment in massive galaxy clusters

We study the evolution of the stellar component and the metallicity of both the intracluster medium and of stars in massive ($M_{\rm vir}\approx 6\times 10^{14}$ M$_{\odot}/h$) simulated galaxy clusters from the Rhapsody-G suite in detail and compare them to observational results. The simulations were performed with the AMR code RAMSES and include the effect of AGN feedback at the sub-grid level. AGN feedback is required to produce realistic galaxy and cluster properties and plays a role in mixing material in the central regions and regulating star formation in the central galaxy. In both our low and high resolution runs with fiducial stellar yields, we find that stellar and ICM metallicities are a factor of two lower than in observations. We find that cool core clusters exhibit steeper metallicity gradients than non-cool core clusters, in qualitative agreement with observations. We verify that the ICM metallicities measured in the simulation can be explained by a simple "regulator" model in which the metallicity is set by a balance of stellar yield and gas accretion. It is plausible that a combination of higher resolution and higher metal yield in AMR simulation would allow the metallicity of simulated clusters to match observed values; however this hypothesis needs to be tested with future simulations. Comparison to recent literature highlights that results concerning the metallicity of clusters and cluster galaxies might depend sensitively on the scheme chosen to solve the hydrodynamics.

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Constraining the Mass-Richness Relationship of redMaPPer Clusters with Angular Clustering

The potential of using cluster clustering for calibrating the mass-observable relation of galaxy clusters has been recognized theoretically for over a decade. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of this technique to achieve high precision mass calibration using redMaPPer clusters in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey North Galactic Cap. By including cross-correlations between several richness bins in our analysis we significantly improve the statistical precision of our mass constraints. The amplitude of the mass-richness relation is constrained to 7% statistical precision. However, the error budget is systematics dominated, reaching an 18% total error that is dominated by theoretical uncertainty in the bias-mass relation for dark matter halos. We perform a detailed treatment of the effects of assembly bias on our analysis, finding that the contribution of such effects to our parameter uncertainties is somewhat greater than that of measurement noise. We confirm the results from Miyatake et al. (2015) that the clustering amplitude of redMaPPer clusters depends on galaxy concentration, and provide additional evidence in support of this effect being due to some form of assembly bias. The results presented here demonstrate the power of cluster clustering for mass calibration and cosmology provided the current theoretical systematics can be ameliorated.

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Connecting CO Intensity Mapping to Molecular Gas and Star Formation in the Epoch of Galaxy Assembly

Intensity mapping, which images a single spectral line from unresolved galaxies across cosmological volumes, is a promising technique for probing the early universe. Here we present predictions for the intensity map and power spectrum of the CO(1-0) line from galaxies at z ~ 2.4 -2.8, based on a parameterized model for the galaxy-halo connection, and demonstrate the extent to which properties of high-redshift galaxies can be directly inferred from such observations. We find that our fiducial prediction should be detectable by a realistic experiment. Motivated by significant modeling uncertainties, we demonstrate the effect on the power spectrum of varying each parameter in our model. Using simulated observations, we infer constraints on our model parameter space with an MCMC procedure, and show corresponding constraints on the LIR-LCO relation and the CO luminosity function. These constraints would be complementary to current high-redshift galaxy observations, which can detect the brightest galaxies but not complete samples from the faint end of the luminosity function. By probing these populations in aggregate, CO intensity mapping could be a valuable tool for probing molecular gas and its relation to star formation in high-redshift galaxies.

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The Eating Habits of Milky Way Mass Halos: Destroyed Dwarf Satellites and the Metallicity Distribution of Accreted Stars

We study the mass spectrum of destroyed dwarfs that contribute to the accreted stellar mass of Milky Way (MW) mass M_vir ~ 10^12.1 M_sun) halos using a suite of 45 zoom-in, dissipationless simulations. Empirical models are employed to relate (peak) subhalo mass to dwarf stellar mass, and we use constraints from z=0 observations and hydrodynamical simulations to estimate the metallicity distribution of the accreted stellar material. The dominant contributors to the accreted stellar mass are relatively massive dwarfs with M_star ~ 10^8-10^10 M_sun. Halos with more quiescent accretion histories tend to have lower mass progenitors (10^8-10^9 M_sun), and lower overall accreted stellar masses. Ultra-faint mass (M_star < 10^5 M_sun) dwarfs contribute a negligible amount (<< 1%) to the accreted stellar mass and, despite having low average metallicities, supply a small fraction (~2-5 %) of the very metal-poor stars with [Fe/H] < -2. Dwarfs with masses 10^5 < M_star/M_sun < 10^8 provide a substantial amount of the very metal-poor stellar material (~40-80 %), and even relatively metal-rich dwarfs with M_star > 10^8 M_sun can contribute a considerable fraction (~20-60 %) of metal-poor stars if their metallicity distributions have significant metal-poor tails. Finally, we find that the generic assumption of a quiescent assembly history for the MW halo seems to be in tension with the mass spectrum of its surviving dwarfs. We suggest that the MW could be a "transient fossil"; a quiescent halo with a recent accretion event(s) that disguises the preceding formation history of the halo.

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Galaxy Cluster Mass Estimation from Stacked Spectroscopic Analysis

We use simulated galaxy surveys to study: i) how galaxy membership in redMaPPer clusters maps to the underlying halo population, and ii) the accuracy of a mean dynamical cluster mass, $M_σ(λ)$, derived from stacked pairwise spectroscopy of clusters with richness $λ$. Using $\sim\! 130,000$ galaxy pairs patterned after the SDSS redMaPPer cluster sample study of Rozo et al. (2015 RMIV), we show that the pairwise velocity PDF of central--satellite pairs with $m_i < 19$ in the simulation matches the form seen in RMIV. Through joint membership matching, we deconstruct the main Gaussian velocity component into its halo contributions, finding that the top-ranked halo contributes $\sim 60\%$ of the stacked signal. The halo mass scale inferred by applying the virial scaling of Evrard et al. (2008) to the velocity normalization matches, to within a few percent, the log-mean halo mass derived through galaxy membership matching. We apply this approach, along with mis-centering and galaxy velocity bias corrections, to estimate the log-mean matched halo mass at $z=0.2$ of SDSS redMaPPer clusters. Employing the velocity bias constraints of Guo et al. (2015), we find $\langle \ln(M_{200c})|λ\rangle = \ln(M_{30}) + α_m \ln(λ/30)$ with $M_{30} = 1.56 \pm 0.35 \times 10^{14} M_\odot$ and $α_m = 1.31 \pm 0.06_{stat} \pm 0.13_{sys}$. Systematic uncertainty in the velocity bias of satellite galaxies overwhelmingly dominates the error budget.

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Disentangling redshift-space distortions and nonlinear bias using the 2D power spectrum

We present the nonlinear 2D galaxy power spectrum, $P(k,μ)$, in redshift space, measured from the Dark Sky simulations, using galaxy catalogs constructed with both halo occupation distribution and subhalo abundance matching methods, chosen to represent an intermediate redshift sample of luminous red galaxies. We find that the information content in individual $μ$ (cosine of the angle to the line of sight) bins is substantially richer then multipole moments, and show that this can be used to isolate the impact of nonlinear growth and redshift space distortion (RSD) effects. Using the $μ<0.2$ simulation data, which we show is not impacted by RSD effects, we can successfully measure the nonlinear bias to an accuracy of $\sim 5$% at $k<0.6 h$Mpc$^{-1}$. This use of individual $μ$ bins to extract the nonlinear bias successfully removes a large parameter degeneracy when constraining the linear growth rate of structure. We carry out a joint parameter estimation, using the low $μ$ simulation data to constrain the nonlinear bias, and $μ\ge0.2$ to constrain the growth rate and show that $f$ can be constrained to $\sim 26\, (22)$% to a $k_{\rm max}< 0.4\, (0.6) h$Mpc$^{-1}$ from clustering alone using a simple dispersion model, for a range of galaxy models. Our analysis of individual $μ$ bins also reveals interesting physical effects which arise simply from different methods of populating halos with galaxies. We find a prominent turnaround scale, at which RSD damping effects are greater then the nonlinear growth, which differs not only for each $μ$ bin but also for each galaxy model. These features may provide unique signatures which could be used to shed light on the galaxy-dark matter connection.

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Detection of lensing substructure using ALMA observations of the dusty galaxy SDP.81

We study the abundance of substructure in the matter density near galaxies using ALMA Science Verification observations of the strong lensing system SDP.81. We present a method to measure the abundance of subhalos around galaxies using interferometric observations of gravitational lenses. Using simulated ALMA observations, we explore the effects of various systematics, including antenna phase errors and source priors, and show how such errors may be measured or marginalized. We apply our formalism to ALMA observations of SDP.81. We find evidence for the presence of a $M=10^{8.96\pm 0.12} M_{\odot}$ subhalo near one of the images, with a significance of $6.9σ$ in a joint fit to data from bands 6 and 7; the effect of the subhalo is also detected in both bands individually. We also derive constraints on the abundance of dark matter subhalos down to $M\sim 2\times 10^7 M_{\odot}$, pushing down to the mass regime of the smallest detected satellites in the Local Group, where there are significant discrepancies between the observed population of luminous galaxies and predicted dark matter subhalos. We find hints of additional substructure, warranting further study using the full SDP.81 dataset (including, for example, the spectroscopic imaging of the lensed carbon monoxide emission). We compare the results of this search to the predictions of $Λ$CDM halos, and find that given current uncertainties in the host halo properties of SDP.81, our measurements of substructure are consistent with theoretical expectations. Observations of larger samples of gravitational lenses with ALMA should be able to improve the constraints on the abundance of galactic substructure.

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The Tully-Fisher and mass-size relations from halo abundance matching

The Tully-Fisher relation (TFR) expresses the connection between rotating galaxies and the dark matter haloes they inhabit, and therefore contains a wealth of information about galaxy formation. We construct a general framework to investigate whether models based on halo abundance matching are able to reproduce the observed stellar mass TFR and mass-size relation (MSR), and use the data to constrain galaxy formation parameters. Our model tests a range of plausible scenarios, differing in the response of haloes to disc formation, the relative angular momentum of baryons and dark matter, the impact of selection effects, and the abundance matching parameters. We show that agreement with the observed TFR puts an upper limit on the scatter between galaxy and halo properties, requires weak or reversed halo contraction, and favours selection effects that preferentially eliminate fast-rotating galaxies. The MSR constrains the ratio of the disc to halo specific angular momentum to be approximately in the range 0.6-1.2. We identify and quantify two problems that models of this nature face. (1) They predict too large an intrinsic scatter for the MSR, and (2) they predict too strong an anticorrelation between the TFR and MSR residuals. We argue that resolving these problems requires introducing a correlation between stellar surface density and enclosed dark matter mass. Finally, we explore the expected difference between the TFRs of central and satellite galaxies, finding that in the favoured models this difference should be detectable in a sample of ~700 galaxies.

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Rhapsody-G simulations I: the cool cores, hot gas and stellar content of massive galaxy clusters

We present the Rhapsody-G suite of cosmological hydrodynamic AMR zoom simulations of ten massive galaxy clusters at the $M_{\rm vir}\sim10^{15}\,{\rm M}_\odot$ scale. These simulations include cooling and sub-resolution models for star formation and stellar and supermassive black hole feedback. The sample is selected to capture the whole gamut of assembly histories that produce clusters of similar final mass. We present an overview of the successes and shortcomings of such simulations in reproducing both the stellar properties of galaxies as well as properties of the hot plasma in clusters. In our simulations, a long-lived cool-core/non-cool core dichotomy arises naturally, and the emergence of non-cool cores is related to low angular momentum major mergers. Nevertheless, the cool-core clusters exhibit a low central entropy compared to observations, which cannot be alleviated by thermal AGN feedback. For cluster scaling relations we find that the simulations match well the $M_{500}-Y_{500}$ scaling of Planck SZ clusters but deviate somewhat from the observed X-ray luminosity and temperature scaling relations in the sense of being slightly too bright and too cool at fixed mass, respectively. Stars are produced at an efficiency consistent with abundance matching constraints and central galaxies have star formation rates consistent with recent observations. While our simulations thus match various key properties remarkably well, we conclude that the shortcomings strongly suggest an important role for non-thermal processes (through feedback or otherwise) or thermal conduction in shaping the intra-cluster medium.

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The Dependence of Subhalo Abundance on Halo Concentration

Hierarchical structure formation implies that the number of subhalos within a dark matter halo depends not only on halo mass, but also on the formation history of the halo. This dependence on the formation history, which is highly correlated with halo concentration, can account for the super-Poissonian scatter in subhalo occupation at a fixed halo mass that has been previously measured in simulations. Here we propose a model to predict the subhalo abundance function for individual host halos, that incorporates both halo mass and concentration. We combine results of cosmological simulations with a new suite of zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass halos to calibrate our model. We show the model can successfully reproduce the mean and the scatter of subhalo occupation in these simulations. The implications of this correlation between subhalo abundance and halo concentration are further investigated. We also discuss cases in which inferences about halo properties can be affected if this correlation between subhalo abundance and halo concentration is ignored; in these cases our model would give a more accurate inference. We propose that with future deep surveys, satellite occupation in the low-mass regime can be used to verify the existence of halo assembly bias.

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Discovery of two gravitationally lensed quasars in the Dark Energy Survey

We present spectroscopic confirmation of two new lensed quasars via data obtained at the 6.5m Magellan/Baade Telescope. The lens candidates have been selected from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and WISE based on their multi-band photometry and extended morphology in DES images. Images of DES J0115-5244 show two blue point sources at either side of a red galaxy. Our long-slit data confirm that both point sources are images of the same quasar at $z_{s}=1.64.$ The Einstein Radius estimated from the DES images is $0.51$". DES J2200+0110 is in the area of overlap between DES and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Two blue components are visible in the DES and SDSS images. The SDSS fiber spectrum shows a quasar component at $z_{s}=2.38$ and absorption compatible with Mg II and Fe II at $z_{l}=0.799$, which we tentatively associate with the foreground lens galaxy. The long-slit Magellan spectra show that the blue components are resolved images of the same quasar. The Einstein Radius is $0.68$" corresponding to an enclosed mass of $1.6\times10^{11}\,M_{\odot}.$ Three other candidates were observed and rejected, two being low-redshift pairs of starburst galaxies, and one being a quasar behind a blue star. These first confirmation results provide an important empirical validation of the data-mining and model-based selection that is being applied to the entire DES dataset.

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Rhapsody-G simulations: galaxy clusters as baryonic closed boxes and the covariance between hot gas and galaxies

Within a sufficiently large cosmic volume, conservation of baryons implies a simple `closed box' view in which the sum of the baryonic components must equal a constant fraction of the total enclosed mass. We present evidence from Rhapsody-G hydrodynamic simulations of massive galaxy clusters that the closed-box expectation may hold to a surprising degree within the interior, non-linear regions of haloes. At a fixed halo mass, we find a significant anti-correlation between hot gas mass fraction and galaxy mass fraction (cold gas + stars), with a rank correlation coefficient of -0.69 within $R_{500c}$. Because of this anti-correlation, the total baryon mass serves as a low-scatter proxy for total cluster mass. The fractional scatter of total baryon fraction scales approximately as $0.02 (Δ_c/100)^{0.6}$, while the scatter of either gas mass or stellar mass is larger in magnitude and declines more slowly with increasing radius. We discuss potential observational tests using cluster samples selected by optical and hot gas properties; the simulations suggest that joint selection on stellar and hot gas has potential to achieve 5% scatter in total halo mass.

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A Critical Assessment of Stellar Mass Measurement Methods

In this paper we perform a comprehensive study of the main sources of random and systematic errors in stellar mass measurement for galaxies using their Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs). We use mock galaxy catalogs with simulated multi-waveband photometry (from U-band to mid-infrared) and known redshift, stellar mass, age and extinction for individual galaxies. Given different parameters affecting stellar mass measurement (photometric S/N ratios, SED fitting errors, systematic effects, the inherent degeneracies and correlated errors), we formulated different simulated galaxy catalogs to quantify these effects individually. We studied the sensitivity of stellar mass estimates to the codes/methods used, population synthesis models, star formation histories, nebular emission line contributions, photometric uncertainties, extinction and age. For each simulated galaxy, the difference between the input stellar masses and those estimated using different simulation catalogs, $Δ\log(M)$, was calculated and used to identify the most fundamental parameters affecting stellar masses. We measured different components of the error budget, with the results listed as follows: (1). no significant bias was found among different codes/methods, with all having comparable scatter; (2). A source of error is found to be due to photometric uncertainties and low resolution in age and extinction grids; (3). The median of stellar masses among different methods provides a stable measure of the mass associated with any given galaxy; (4). The deviations in stellar mass strongly correlate with those in age, with a weaker correlation with extinction; (5). the scatter in the stellar masses due to free parameters are quantified, with the sensitivity of the stellar mass to both the population synthesis codes and inclusion of nebular emission lines studied.

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The Relation Between SFR and Stellar Mass for Galaxies at 3.5 $\le z\le$ 6.5 in CANDELS

Distant star-forming galaxies show a correlation between their star formation rates (SFR) and stellar masses, and this has deep implications for galaxy formation. Here, we present a study on the evolution of the slope and scatter of the SFR-stellar mass relation for galaxies at $3.5\leq z\leq 6.5$ using multi-wavelength photometry in GOODS-S from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) and Spitzer Extended Deep Survey. We describe an updated, Bayesian spectral-energy distribution fitting method that incorporates effects of nebular line emission, star formation histories that are constant or rising with time, and different dust attenuation prescriptions (starburst and Small Magellanic Cloud). From $z$=6.5 to $z$=3.5 star-forming galaxies in CANDELS follow a nearly unevolving correlation between stellar mass and SFR that follows SFR $\sim$ $M_\star^a$ with $a = 0.54 \pm 0.16$ at $z\sim 6$ and $0.70 \pm 0.21$ at $z\sim 4$. This evolution requires a star formation history that increases with decreasing redshift (on average, the SFRs of individual galaxies rise with time). The observed scatter in the SFR-stellar mass relation is tight, $σ(\log \mathrm{SFR}/\mathrm{M}_\odot$ yr$^{-1})< 0.3\ - $ 0.4 dex, for galaxies with $\log M_\star/\mathrm{M}_\odot > 9$ dex. Assuming that the SFR is tied to the net gas inflow rate (SFR $\sim$ $\dot{M}_\mathrm{gas}$), then the scatter in the gas inflow rate is also smaller than 0.3$-$0.4 dex for star-forming galaxies in these stellar mass and redshift ranges, at least when averaged over the timescale of star formation. We further show that the implied star formation history of objects selected on the basis of their co-moving number densities is consistent with the evolution in the SFR-stellar mass relation.

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Spectroscopic failures in photometric redshift calibration: cosmological biases and survey requirements

We use N-body-spectro-photometric simulations to investigate the impact of incompleteness and incorrect redshifts in spectroscopic surveys to photometric redshift training and calibration and the resulting effects on cosmological parameter estimation from weak lensing shear-shear correlations. The photometry of the simulations is modeled after the upcoming Dark Energy Survey and the spectroscopy is based on a low/intermediate resolution spectrograph with wavelength coverage of 5500Å < λ < 9500Å. The principal systematic errors that such a spectroscopic follow-up encounters are incompleteness (inability to obtain spectroscopic redshifts for certain galaxies) and wrong redshifts. Encouragingly, we find that a neural network-based approach can effectively describe the spectroscopic incompleteness in terms of the galaxies' colors, so that the spectroscopic selection can be applied to the photometric sample. Hence, we find that spectroscopic incompleteness yields no appreciable biases to cosmology, although the statistical constraints degrade somewhat because the photometric survey has to be culled to match the spectroscopic selection. Unfortunately, wrong redshifts have a more severe impact: the cosmological biases are intolerable if more than a percent of the spectroscopic redshifts are incorrect. Moreover, we find that incorrect redshifts can also substantially degrade the accuracy of training set based photo-z estimators. The main problem is the difficulty of obtaining redshifts, either spectroscopically or photometrically, for objects at z > 1.3. We discuss several approaches for reducing the cosmological biases, in particular finding that photo-z error estimators can reduce biases appreciably.

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redMaPPer IV: Photometric Membership Identification of Cluster Galaxies with 1% Precision

In order to study the galaxy population of galaxy clusters with photometric data one must be able to accurately discriminate between cluster members and non-members. The redMaPPer cluster finding algorithm treats this problem probabilistically. Here, we utilize SDSS and GAMA spectroscopic membership rates to validate the redMaPPer membership probability estimates for clusters with $z\in[0.1,0.3]$. We find small - but correctable - biases, sourced by three different systematics. The first two were expected a priori, namely blue cluster galaxies and correlated structure along the line of sight. The third systematic is new: the redMaPPer template fitting exhibits a non-trivial dependence on photometric noise, which biases the original redMaPPer probabilities when utilizing noisy data. After correcting for these effects, we find exquisite agreement ($\approx 1\%$) between the photometric probability estimates and the spectroscopic membership rates, demonstrating that we can robustly recover cluster membership estimates from photometric data alone. As a byproduct of our analysis we find that on average unavoidable projection effects from correlated structure contribute $\approx 6\%$ of the richness of a redMaPPer galaxy cluster. This work also marks the second public release of the SDSS redMaPPer cluster catalog.

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Dark Sky Simulations: Early Data Release

The Dark Sky Simulations are an ongoing series of cosmological N-body simulations designed to provide a quantitative and accessible model of the evolution of the large-scale Universe. Such models are essential for many aspects of the study of dark matter and dark energy, since we lack a sufficiently accurate analytic model of non-linear gravitational clustering. In July 2014, we made available to the general community our early data release, consisting of over 55 Terabytes of simulation data products, including our largest simulation to date, which used $1.07 \times 10^{12}~(10240^3)$ particles in a volume $8h^{-1}\mathrm{Gpc}$ across. Our simulations were performed with 2HOT, a purely tree-based adaptive N-body method, running on 200,000 processors of the Titan supercomputer, with data analysis enabled by yt. We provide an overview of the derived halo catalogs, mass function, power spectra and light cone data. We show self-consistency in the mass function and mass power spectrum at the 1% level over a range of more than 1000 in particle mass. We also present a novel method to distribute and access very large datasets, based on an abstraction of the World Wide Web (WWW) as a file system, remote memory-mapped file access semantics, and a space-filling curve index. This method has been implemented for our data release, and provides a means to not only query stored results such as halo catalogs, but also to design and deploy new analysis techniques on large distributed datasets.

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