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

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, mb ∼ 6 × 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 multi-channel stellar feedback. Here, we focus on validating the simulation predictions by comparing to observational data. We find that simulated galaxies with Mstar < 1010.5 − 11 M⊙ have star formation rates, gas masses, and metallicities in broad agreement 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 modeling challenges to be addressed in next-generation galaxy simulations.

The UNCOVER Survey: A First-look HST+JWST Catalog of Galaxy Redshifts and Stellar Population Properties Spanning 0.2 ≲ z ≲ 15

“…Following Leja et al (2019a), we take the conservative approach of widening the confidence intervals from this relationship by a factor of 2 to account for potential unknown systematics or redshift evolution. This prior neglects predictions from galaxy formation models, which suggest a smaller scatter and a relatively strong redshift evolution (Ma et al 2016;Feldmann et al 2023).…”

Molecular Gas and Star Formation in Nearby Starburst Galaxy Mergers

“…The Antennae has been widely studied and matched by noncosmological simulations (e.g., Renaud et al 2019a;Li et al 2022), but NGC 3256 is less well studied. Besides comparing with these noncosmological simulations, we could also compare observations with cosmological simulations, such as FIREBox (Feldmann et al 2023), that include local mergers.…”

Stochastic Modeling of Star Formation Histories. III. Constraints from Physically Motivated Gaussian Processes

“…An advantage of the model proposed in this paper is that it can be incorporated in modular codes that also have state-of-the-art chemical enrichment histories (Thorne et al 2021;Camps-Fariña et al 2022;Thorne et al 2022;Zhou et al 2022) to obtain joint constraints from the observations and better inform future work. The next generation of large-volume, high-resolution simulations (Nelson et al 2019;Pillepich et al 2019;Feldmann et al 2023) and studies that systematically vary feedback prescriptions (Villaescusa-Navarro et al 2021 are needed to robustly understand these effective timescales and further refine the GP kernel as needed.…”