U2-2016
Speaker: Prof. Daniel Thomas, University of Leeds
Title: Galaxy formation - simulated and real
We use a forward-modelling approach to test predictions from hydro-dynamical cosmological simulations of galaxy formation with spatially-resolved observations of the local galaxy population. We introduce a method to generate mock SDSS-IV/MaNGA integral-field spectroscopic galaxy observations from the TNG50 simulations,
investigating the dependence of radial gradients in age and metallicity on fundamental galaxy properties. The key point of our analysis is that the observational biases plaguing the interpretation of observational data are emulated in the theoretical sample. It turns out that cosmological simulations recover the basic stellar population properties, age and metallicity, well overall. However, we identify interesting differences between simulations and observations in some key aspects that can inform further development of the simulations and
their theoretical framework.
Host: Matteo Fossati