activity
20082026
most citedIntroducing the THESAN project: radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the epoch of reionization

234 citations · 2.9k across the 104 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

106 papers

astro-ph.GA2026

The THESAN-ZOOM project: the delayed rise of Lyman continuum escape fractions in bursty high-redshift galaxies

Parth Mehrotra, Aaron Smith, Yuan Bian +13

The ionizing radiation that galaxies release into their surroundings depends on whether efficient Lyman continuum (LyC) escape coincides with strong photon production. Stellar feed…

astro-ph.CO2026

The Lumina Project: Morphology of Ionized Bubbles and Neutral Islands

Meredith Neyer, Aaron Smith, Ali Sadain +10

The Epoch of Reionization is characterized by the nucleation, expansion, and percolation of ionized bubbles in the intergalactic medium. Interpreting emerging multi-wavelength obse…

astro-ph.GA2026

RIGEL: Ultra-faint dwarf galaxy diversity shaped by inhomogeneous cosmic reionization

Yunwei Deng, Hui Li, Ewald Puchwein +7

Ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs) are among the smallest and oldest galaxies in the Universe and are widely regarded as relics of cosmic reionization. To investigate how reionizati…

astro-ph.GA2026

The THESAN-ZOOM project: clumpiness of high-redshift galaxies and its connection to bursty star formation

Zihao Wang, Xuejian Shen, Rahul Kannan +12

Recent JWST observations have revealed diverse high-redshift galaxy morphologies, including a population with irregular and clumpy structures. The physical origin of these structur…

astro-ph.GA2026

The Thesan-Zoom project: bursty star formation is incompatible with prolonged dust survival

Enrico Garaldi, Filip Popovic, Rahul Kannan +11

Cosmic dust is a key regulator of galaxy evolution, but its build-up and survival in the first billion years remain poorly constrained. We present a systematic analysis of dust in…

astro-ph.GA2026

Globular cluster abundance patterns inherited from giant molecular clouds

William McClymont, Vasily Belokurov, Sandro Tacchella +16

Globular clusters exhibit large star-to-star variations and anticorrelations in their light element abundances that are commonly interpreted in terms of in-cluster self-enrichment,…

astro-ph.GA2026

The Lumina Project: Intergalactic Clumping and Recombination Sinks

Ali Sadain, Aaron Smith, Oliver Zier +10

Recombinations during the Epoch of Reionization are intrinsically inhomogeneous, with different regions of the intergalactic medium contributing unevenly depending on their density…

astro-ph.GA2026

From THESAN-ZOOM to JWST: Predicting ionizing photon escape and the rise of UV-bright reionization sources

Zebedee Summerfield, William McClymont, Sandro Tacchella +14

Understanding the sources and evolution of cosmic reionization remains a central challenge in astrophysics, with the escape of ionizing Lyman-continuum (LyC) photons from early gal…

astro-ph.GA2026

A framework for modelling Population III stars in cosmological simulations

Bipradeep Saha, Rahul Kannan, Giovanni M. Mirouh

Population III (Pop III) stars are the first generation of stars to form in the universe, emerging from primordial gas composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. They play a crucial r…

astro-ph.GA2026★ 1 cited

The Lumina Project: The Demographics of Active Galactic Nuclei from Quasars to Little Red Dots at

Xuejian Shen, Oliver Zier, Aaron Smith +16

High-redshift active galactic nuclei (AGN) serve as powerful probes of early black-hole growth, galaxy formation, and the evolving intergalactic medium (IGM). In this work, we use…

astro-ph.CO2026

The Lumina Project: CMB Optical Depth Fluctuations from Patchy Reionization

Aaron Smith, Oliver Zier, Rahul Kannan +8

Patchy reionization couples the ionized-bubble morphology to the underlying density field, making the CMB Thomson optical depth sensitive to both the global ionization history and…

astro-ph.CO2026

Introducing the Lumina project: large-volume radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of the epochs of hydrogen and helium reionization

Oliver Zier, Aaron Smith, Xuejian Shen +8

Understanding how galaxies and active galactic nuclei (AGN) jointly drive the reionization of the intergalactic medium (IGM) across cosmic time remains a major challenge in cosmolo…

astro-ph.GA2026

Identifying signatures of inflow onto face-on galaxies using the Balmer decrement

Meghna Sitaram, Hui Li, Yong Zheng +4

Isolated star-forming galaxies require inflows of fresh gas from the surrounding medium to sustain episodes of star formation over time. However, there are very few direct detectio…

astro-ph.CO2025

The THESAN project: Lyman-alpha intensity mapping of cosmic reionization

Mouza Almualla, Aaron Smith, Rahul Kannan +6

Line Intensity Mapping (LIM) has garnered attention as a powerful cosmological probe, with next-generation instruments such as SPHEREx preparing to map the evolution of large-scale…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 1 cited

RIGEL: Feedback-regulated cloud-scale star formation efficiency in a simulated dwarf galaxy merger

Yunwei Deng, Hui Li, Federico Marinacci +5

Major mergers of galaxies are likely to trigger bursty star formation activities. The accumulation of dense gas and the boost of star formation efficiency (SFE) are considered to b…

astro-ph.GA2025

Metallicity Gradients in Modern Cosmological Simulations II: The Role of Bursty Versus Smooth Feedback at High-Redshift

Alex M. Garcia, Paul Torrey, Aniket Bhagwat +22

The distribution of gas-phase metals within galaxies encodes the impact of stellar feedback on galactic evolution. At high-redshift, when galaxies are rapidly assembling, feedback-…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 2 cited

The THESAN project: Lyman-alpha emitters as probes of ionized bubble sizes

Meredith Neyer, Aaron Smith, Mark Vogelsberger +4

We use the THESAN radiation-hydrodynamics simulations to investigate how Lyman- emitters (LAEs) trace ionized bubble sizes during the Epoch of Reionization. We generate realisti…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 2 cited

The THESAN-ZOOM project: The Hidden Neighbours of OI Absorbers during Reionization

Giulia Pruto, Laura Keating, Rahul Kannan +9

Metal absorbers represent a powerful probe of galaxy feedback and reionization, as highlighted by both observational and theoretical results showing an increased abundance of low-i…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 1 cited

The Entangling of Supernova Feedback Impacts with Coarsening Simulation Resolution

Eric Zhang, Laura V. Sales, Thales A. Gutcke +11

It is often understood that supernova (SN) feedback in galaxies is responsible for regulating star formation (SF) and generating gaseous outflows. However, a detailed look at the s…

astro-ph.CO2025★ 2 cited

The THESAN project: environmental drivers of Local Group reionization

Yu Zhao, Aaron Smith, Rahul Kannan +5

The timing of cosmic reionization across Local Group (LG) analogues provides insights into their early histories and surrounding large-scale structure. Using the radiation-hydrodyn…

astro-ph.CO2025★ 1 cited

Measuring the splashback feature: Dependence on halo properties and history

Qiaorong S. Yu, Stephanie O'Neil, Xuejian Shen +7

In this study, we define the novel splashback depth and width to examine how the splashback features of dark matter haloes are affected by the physical…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 3 cited

High-redshift AGN population in radiation-hydrodynamics simulations

Teodora-Elena Bulichi, Oliver Zier, Aaron Smith +7

High-redshift active galactic nuclei (AGN) have long been recognized as key probes of early black hole growth and galaxy evolution. However, modeling this population remains diffic…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 5 cited

The THESAN-ZOOM project: Mystery N/O more -- uncovering the origin of peculiar chemical abundances and a not-so-fundamental metallicity relation at

William McClymont, Sandro Tacchella, Aaron Smith +15

We present an analysis of metallicities and chemical abundances at in the THESAN-ZOOM simulations. We find that smoothly curved gas-phase and stellar mass-metallicity rela…

astro-ph.GA2025★ 7 cited

Overmassive black holes in the early Universe can be explained by gas-rich, dark matter-dominated galaxies

William McClymont, Sandro Tacchella, Xihan Ji +12

JWST has revealed the apparent evolution of the black hole (BH)-stellar mass (-$M_\rm{\ast}$) relation in the early Universe, while remaining consistent with the BH-…