An Empirical Approach to Cosmological Galaxy Survey Simulation: Application to SPHEREx Low-Resolution Spectroscopy

Abstract

Highly accurate models of the galaxy population over cosmological volumes are necessary in order to predict the performance of upcoming cosmological missions. We present a data-driven model of the galaxy population constrained by deep 0.1-8 $\mu \mathrm{m}$ imaging and spectroscopic data in the COSMOS survey, with the immediate goal of simulating the spectroscopic redshift performance of the proposed SPHEREx mission. SPHEREx will obtain over the full-sky $R\sim 41$ spectrophotometry at moderate spatial resolution ($\sim 6"$) over the wavelength range 0.75-4.18 $\mu \mathrm{m}$ and $R\sim 135$ over the wavelength range 4.18-5 $\mu \mathrm{m}$. We show that our simulation accurately reproduces a range of known galaxy properties, encapsulating the full complexity of the galaxy population and enables realistic, full end-to-end simulations to predict mission performance. Finally, we discuss potential applications of the simulation framework to future cosmology missions and give a description of released data products.

References in corpus (6)

• Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report
• LSST Science Book, Version 2.0
• Euclid Definition Study Report
• The DESI Experiment, a whitepaper for Snowmass 2013
• Cosmology with the SPHEREX All-Sky Spectral Survey
• NebulOS: A Big Data Framework for Astrophysics

Cited by in corpus (1)

• A hierarchical clustering method for quantifying satellite abundance