Realistic synthetic integral field spectroscopy with RealSim-IFS

Abstract

The most direct way to confront observed galaxies with those formed in numerical simulations is to forward-model simulated galaxies into synthetic observations. Provided that synthetic galaxy observations include similar constraints and limitations as real observations, they can be used to (1) carry out even-handed comparisons of observation and theory and (2) map the observable characteristics of simulated galaxies to their a priori known origins. In particular, integral field spectroscopy (IFS) expands the scope of such comparisons and mappings to an exceptionally broad set of physical properties. We therefore present RealSim-IFS: a tool for forward-modelling galaxies from hydrodynamical simulations into synthetic IFS observations. The core components of RealSim-IFS model the detailed spatial sampling mechanics of any fibre-bundle, image slicer, or lenslet array IFU and corresponding observing strategy, real or imagined, and support the corresponding propagation of noise adopted by the user. The code is highly generalized and can produce cubes in any light- or mass-weighted quantity (e.g. specific intensity, gas/stellar line-of-sight velocity, stellar age/metallicity, etc.). We show that RealSim-IFS exactly reproduces the spatial reconstruction of specific intensity and variance cubes produced by the MaNGA survey Data Reduction Pipeline using the calibrated fibre spectra as input. We then apply RealSim-IFS by producing a public synthetic MaNGA stellar kinematic survey of 893 galaxies with $\log M_{\star }/M_{\odot }>10$ from the TNG50 cosmological hydrodynamical simulation.

18 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS accepted. Code URL: [https://github.com/cbottrell/realsim_ifs]. Data (Input): [http://idark.ipmu.jp/hsc405/LOSVD/]. Data (Output): [http://idark.ipmu.jp/hsc405/MaNGA/]

References in corpus (28)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Overview of the SDSS-IV MaNGA Survey: Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory
• Improving the full spectrum fitting method: accurate convolution with Gauss-Hermite functions
• Properties of galaxies reproduced by a hydrodynamic simulation
• Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: instrument specification and target selection
• The MaNGA Integral Field Unit Fiber Feed System for the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope
• The Data Reduction Pipeline for the SDSS-IV MaNGA IFU Galaxy Survey
• The SDSS-IV MaNGA Sample: Design, Optimization, and Usage Considerations
• SKIRT: an Advanced Dust Radiative Transfer Code with a User-Friendly Architecture
• Sunrise: Polychromatic Dust Radiative Transfer in Arbitrary Geometries
• Dark Matter Substructure in Numerical Simulations: A Tale of Discreteness Noise, Runaway Instabilities, and Artificial Disruption
• A catalogue of 2D photometric decompositions in the SDSS-DR7 spectroscopic main galaxy sample: preferred models and systematics
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Revisiting Galaxy Classification Through High-Order Stellar Kinematics
• Deep learning predictions of galaxy merger stage and the importance of observational realism
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Cubism and covariance, putting round pegs into square holes
• Galaxies in the Illustris simulation as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - II: Size-luminosity relations and the deficit of bulge-dominated galaxies in Illustris at low mass
• Fast galaxy bars continue to challenge standard cosmology
• On the evolution of galaxy spin in a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation of galaxy clusters
• Bulge plus disc and Sérsic decomposition catalogues for 16,908 galaxies in the SDSS Stripe 82 co-adds: A detailed study of the $ugriz$ structural measurements
• Galaxies in the Illustris simulation as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - I: Bulge+disc decompositions, methods, and biases
• Quenching Timescales in the IllustrisTNG Simulation
• Stacked star formation rate profiles of bursty galaxies exhibit 'coherent' star formation
• Towards robust determination of non-parametric morphologies in marginal astronomical data: resolving uncertainties with cosmological hydrodynamical simulations
• Accurate Identification of Galaxy Mergers with Stellar Kinematics
• Lopsided galactic bars
• Robustness of deep learning algorithms in astronomy -- galaxy morphology studies

Cited by in corpus (8)

• The Contribution of In-situ and Ex-situ Star Formation in Early-Type Galaxies: MaNGA versus IllustrisTNG
• MaNGIA: 10,000 mock galaxies for stellar population analysis
• Molecular gas and star formation in nearby starburst galaxy mergers
• MaNGA galaxy properties -- II. A detailed comparison of observed and simulated spiral galaxy scaling relations
• Spatially resolved mock observations of stellar kinematics: full radiative transfer treatment of simulated galaxies
• iMaNGA: mock MaNGA galaxies based on IllustrisTNG and MaStar SSPs -- II. The catalogue
• GalaxyGenius: Mock galaxy image generator for various telescopes from hydrodynamical simulations
• The Tremaine-Weinberg method at high redshifts