High-resolution synthetic UV-submm images for Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies from the ARTEMIS project

Abstract

We present redshift-zero synthetic dust-aware observations for the 45 Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies of the ARTEMIS project, calculated with the SKIRT radiative transfer code. The post-processing procedure includes components for star-forming regions, stellar sources, and diffuse dust. We produce and publicly release realistic high-resolution images for 50 commonly-used broadband filters from ultraviolet to sub-millimetre wavelengths and for 18 different viewing angles. We compare the simulated ARTEMIS galaxies to observed galaxies in the DustPedia database with similar stellar mass and star formation rate, and to synthetic observations of the simulated galaxies of the Auriga project produced in previous work using a similar post-processing technique. In all cases, global galaxy properties are derived using SED fitting. We find that, similar to Auriga, the post-processed ARTEMIS galaxies generally reproduce the observed scaling relations for global fluxes and physical properties, although dust extinction at FUV/UV wavelengths is underestimated and representative dust temperatures are lower than observed. At a resolved scale, we compare multi-wavelength non-parametric morphological properties of selected disc galaxies across the data sets. We find that the ARTEMIS galaxies largely reproduce the observed morphological trends as a function of wavelength, although they appear to be more clumpy and less symmetrical than observed. We note that the ARTEMIS and Auriga galaxies occupy adjacent regions in the specific star formation versus stellar mass plane, so that the synthetic observation data sets supplement each other.

UV to submillimetre luminosity functions of TNG50 galaxies

“…It is equipped with an extensive library of SED models, dust models and geometry models and advanced spatial grids (Saftly et al 2013(Saftly et al , 2014Camps et al 2013). In the past few years, has been extensively used to generate synthetic observations for hydrodynamically simulated galaxies, including synthetic fluxes and SEDs (e.g., Camps et al 2016;Trayford et al 2017;Camps et al 2018;Vogelsberger et al 2020b), images (e.g., Saftly et al 2015;Rodriguez-Gomez et al 2019;Camps et al 2022;Popping et al 2022), and polarisation maps (Vandenbroucke et al 2021).…”

“…The assumed dust model is the THEMIS model for the diffuse ISM (Jones et al 2017), with 15 grain size bins (Kapoor et al 2021). In a recent study, Camps et al (2022) analysed differences between the THEMIS and the commonly used Zubko et al (2004) dust model in the context of the post-processing of the cosmological galaxy simulations. They state in their Appendix A, that since the THEMIS model is generally more emissive and that its grain population shows up to 25 per cent more extinction than Zubko et al (2004), the agreement with the observations is wavelength dependant.…”