Seminar "IllustrisTNG" given by Annalisa Pillepich

On Tue., April 4, Annalisa Pillepich (U. of Iceland) will give the seminar "IllustrisTNG".

Abstract:
I will give an account of the numerical efforts to simulate galaxies with the code AREPO across an unprecedented range of halo masses, environments and evolutionary stages. In particular, I will present an overview of the IllustrisTNG project, a collaboration among Heidelberg, Munich and Boston: there we are aiming to simulate "ab-initio" a series of three cosmological volumes (50, 100, 300 Mpc on a side) capable of both resolving the inner structures of galaxies as small as the classical dwarfs of the Milky Way, as well as of sampling the large scale structure of the Universe with thousands among groups and clusters of galaxies. The IllustrisTNG galaxy formation model is built and improves upon the successes and failures of the numerical feedback implementations adopted in Illustris (http://www.illustris-project.org/). I will therefore review the basic ideas behind the functioning of the code, what is explicitly and empirically solved in gravity+hydrodynamics simulations for galaxy formation in a cosmological context, and what is required to “successfully” reproduce populations of galaxies which resemble the real ones. I will therefore show preliminary results from the IllustrisTNG simulations and give an idea of the many applications such simulations can be used to shed light on the details of how galaxies assemble and transform through cosmic times.