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It has been claimed that traditional models struggle to explain the tentative detection of the 21 cm absorption trough centered atz∼ 17 measured by the EDGES collaboration. On the other hand, it has been shown that the EDGES results are consistent with an extrapolation of a declining UV luminosity density, following a simple power law of deep Hubble Space Telescope observations of 4 <z< 9 galaxies. We here explore the conditions by which the EDGES detection is consistent with current reionization and post-reionization observations, including the neutral hydrogen fraction atz∼ 6–8, Thomson-scattering optical depth, and ionizing emissivity atz∼ 5. By coupling a physically motivated source model derived from radiative transfer hydrodynamic simulations of reionization to a Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler, we find that it is entirely possible to reconcile existing high-redshift (cosmic dawn) and low-redshift (reionization) constraints. In particular, we find that high contributions from low-mass halos along with high photon escape fractions are required to simultaneously reproduce cosmic dawn and reionization constraints. Our analysis further confirms that low-mass galaxies produce a flatter emissivity evolution, which leads to an earlier onset of reionization with a gradual and longer duration, resulting in a higher optical depth. While the models dominated by faint galaxies successfully reproduce the measured globally averaged quantities over the first one billion years, they underestimate the late redshift-instantaneous measurements in efficiently star-forming and massive systems. We show that our (simple) physically motivated semianalytical prescription produces results that are consistent with the (sophisticated) state-of-the-artTHESANradiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulation of the reionization.

 

Modelling galaxy formation in hydrodynamic simulations has increasingly adopted various radiative transfer methods to account for photoionization feedback from young massive stars. However, the evolution of H ii regions around stars begins in dense star-forming clouds and spans large dynamical ranges in both space and time, posing severe challenges for numerical simulations in terms of both spatial and temporal resolution that depends strongly on gas density (∝n−1). In this work, we perform a series of idealized H ii region simulations using the moving-mesh radiation-hydrodynamic code arepo-rt to study the effects of numerical resolution. The simulated results match the analytical solutions and the ionization feedback converges only if the Strömgren sphere is resolved by at least 10–100 resolution elements and the size of each time integration step is smaller than 0.1 times the recombination time-scale. Insufficient spatial resolution leads to reduced ionization fraction but enhanced ionized gas mass and momentum feedback from the H ii regions, as well as degrading the multiphase interstellar medium into a diffuse, partially ionized, warm (∼8000 K) gas. On the other hand, insufficient temporal resolution strongly suppresses the effects of ionizing feedback. This is because longer time-steps are not able to resolve the rapid variation of the thermochemistry properties of the gas cells around massive stars, especially when the photon injection and thermochemistry are performed with different cadences. Finally, we provide novel numerical implementations to overcome the above issues when strict resolution requirements are not achievable in practice.

 

JWST observations have revealed a population of galaxies bright enough that potentially challenge standard galaxy formation models in the Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology. Using a minimal empirical framework, we investigate the influence of variability on the rest-frame ultra-violet (UV) luminosity function of galaxies at z ≥ 9. Our study differentiates between the median UV radiation yield and the variability of UV luminosities of galaxies at a fixed dark matter halo mass. We primarily focus on the latter effect, which depends on halo assembly and galaxy formation processes and can significantly increase the abundance of UV-bright galaxies due to the upscatter of galaxies in lower-mass haloes. We find that a relatively low level of variability, σUV ≈ 0.75 mag, matches the observational constraints at z ≈ 9. However, increasingly larger σUV is necessary when moving to higher redshifts, reaching $\sigma _{\rm UV} \approx 2.0\, (2.5)\, {\rm mag}$ at z ≈ 12 (16). This implied variability is consistent with expectations of physical processes in high-redshift galaxies such as bursty star formation and dust clearance during strong feedback cycles. Photometric constraints from JWST at z ≳ 9 therefore can be reconciled with a standard ΛCDM-based galaxy formation model calibrated at lower redshifts without the need for adjustments to the median UV radiation yield.

 

Using high-resolution cosmological radiation-hydrodynamic (RHD) simulations (thesan-hr), we explore the impact of alternative dark matter (altDM) models on galaxies during the Epoch of Reionization. The simulations adopt the IllustrisTNG galaxy formation model. We focus on altDM models that exhibit small-scale suppression of the matter power spectrum, namely warm dark matter (WDM), fuzzy dark matter (FDM), and interacting dark matter (IDM) with strong dark acoustic oscillations (sDAO). In altDM scenarios, both the halo mass functions and the ultraviolet luminosity functions at z ≳ 6 are suppressed at the low-mass/faint end, leading to delayed global star formation and reionization histories. However, strong non-linear effects enable altDM models to ‘catch up’ with cold dark matter (CDM) in terms of star formation and reionization. The specific star formation rates are enhanced in halos below the half-power mass in altDM models. This enhancement coincides with increased gas abundance, reduced gas depletion times, more compact galaxy sizes, and steeper metallicity gradients at the outskirts of the galaxies. These changes in galaxy properties can help disentangle altDM signatures from a range of astrophysical uncertainties. Meanwhile, it is the first time that altDM models have been studied in RHD simulations of galaxy formation. We uncover significant systematic uncertainties in reionization assumptions on the faint-end luminosity function. This underscores the necessity of accurately modeling the small-scale morphology of reionization in making predictions for the low-mass galaxy population. Upcoming James Webb Space Telescope imaging surveys of deep lensed fields hold potential for uncovering the faint low-mass galaxy population, which could provide constraints on altDM models.

 

The feedback loop between the galaxies producing the background radiation field for reionization and their growth is crucial, particularly for low-mass haloes. Despite this, the vast majority of galaxy formation studies employ a spatially uniform, time-varying reionizing background, with the majority of reionization studies employing galaxy formation models only required to work at high redshift. This paper uses the well-studied TNG galaxy formation model, calibrated at low redshift, coupled to the arepo-rt code, to self-consistently solve the coupled problems of galaxy evolution and reionization, evaluating the impact of patchy (and slow) reionization on early galaxies. thesan-hr is an extension of the thesan project to higher resolution (a factor of 50 increase, with a baryonic mass of mb ≈ 104 M⊙), to additionally enable the study of ‘mini-haloes’ with virial temperatures Tvir < 104 K. Comparing the self-consistent model to a uniform UV background, we show that galaxies in thesan-hr are predicted to be larger in physical extent (by a factor ∼2), less metal enriched (by ∼0.2 dex), and less abundant (by a factor ∼10 at M1500 =   − 10) by z = 5. We show that differences in star formation and enrichment patterns lead to significantly different predictions for star formation in low mass haloes, low-metallicity star formation, and even the occupation fraction of haloes. We posit that cosmological galaxy formation simulations aiming to study early galaxy formation (z ≳ 3) must employ a spatially inhomogeneous UV background to accurately reproduce galaxy properties.

 

Upcoming large galaxy surveys will subject the standard cosmological model, Lambda Cold Dark Matter, to new precision tests. These can be tightened considerably if theoretical models of galaxy formation are available that can predict galaxy clustering and galaxy–galaxy lensing on the full range of measurable scales, throughout volumes as large as those of the surveys, and with sufficient flexibility that uncertain aspects of the underlying astrophysics can be marginalized over. This, in particular, requires mock galaxy catalogues in large cosmological volumes that can be directly compared to observation, and can be optimized empirically by Monte Carlo Markov Chains or other similar schemes, thus eliminating or estimating parameters related to galaxy formation when constraining cosmology. Semi-analytic galaxy formation methods implemented on top of cosmological dark matter simulations offer a computationally efficient approach to construct physically based and flexibly parametrized galaxy formation models, and as such they are more potent than still faster, but purely empirical models. Here, we introduce an updated methodology for the semi-analytic L-Galaxies code, allowing it to be applied to simulations of the new MillenniumTNG project, producing galaxies directly on fully continuous past lightcones, potentially over the full sky, out to high redshift, and for all galaxies more massive than $\sim 10^8\, {\rm M}_\odot$. We investigate the numerical convergence of the resulting predictions, and study the projected galaxy clustering signals of different samples. The new methodology can be viewed as an important step towards more faithful forward-modelling of observational data, helping to reduce systematic distortions in the comparison of theory to observations.

 

We study weak gravitational lensing convergence maps produced from the MillenniumTNG simulations by direct projection of the mass distribution on the past backwards lightcone of a fiducial observer. We explore the lensing maps over a large dynamic range in simulation mass and angular resolution, allowing us to establish a clear assessment of numerical convergence. By comparing full physics hydrodynamical simulations with corresponding dark-matter-only runs, we quantify the impact of baryonic physics on the most important weak lensing statistics. Likewise, we predict the impact of massive neutrinos reliably far into the non-linear regime. We also demonstrate that the ‘fixed & paired’ variance suppression technique increases the statistical robustness of the simulation predictions on large scales not only for time slices but also for continuously output lightcone data. We find that both baryonic and neutrino effects substantially impact weak lensing shear measurements, with the latter dominating over the former on large angular scales. Thus, both effects must explicitly be included to obtain sufficiently accurate predictions for stage IV lensing surveys. Reassuringly, our results agree accurately with other simulation results where available, supporting the promise of simulation modelling for precision cosmology far into the non-linear regime.

 

Cosmological inference with large galaxy surveys requires theoretical models that combine precise predictions for large-scale structure with robust and flexible galaxy formation modelling throughout a sufficiently large cosmic volume. Here, we introduce the millenniumTNG (MTNG) project which combines the hydrodynamical galaxy formation model of illustrisTNG with the large volume of the millennium simulation. Our largest hydrodynamic simulation, covering $(500 \, h^{-1}{\rm Mpc})^3 \simeq (740\, {\rm Mpc})^3$, is complemented by a suite of dark-matter-only simulations with up to 43203 dark matter particles (a mass resolution of $1.32\times 10^8 \, h^{-1}{\rm M}_\odot$) using the fixed-and-paired technique to reduce large-scale cosmic variance. The hydro simulation adds 43203 gas cells, achieving a baryonic mass resolution of $2\times 10^7 \, h^{-1}{\rm M}_\odot$. High time-resolution merger trees and direct light-cone outputs facilitate the construction of a new generation of semi-analytic galaxy formation models that can be calibrated against both the hydro simulation and observation, and then applied to even larger volumes – MTNG includes a flagship simulation with 1.1 trillion dark matter particles and massive neutrinos in a volume of $(3000\, {\rm Mpc})^3$. In this introductory analysis we carry out convergence tests on basic measures of non-linear clustering such as the matter power spectrum, the halo mass function and halo clustering, and we compare simulation predictions to those from current cosmological emulators. We also use our simulations to study matter and halo statistics, such as halo bias and clustering at the baryonic acoustic oscillation scale. Finally we measure the impact of baryonic physics on the matter and halo distributions.

 

Abstract A fundamental requirement for reionizing the Universe is that a sufficient fraction of the ionizing photons emitted by galaxies successfully escapes into the intergalactic medium. However, due to the scarcity of high-redshift observational data, the sources driving reionization remain uncertain. In this work, we calculate the ionizing escape fractions (fesc) of reionization-era galaxies from the state-of-the-art thesan simulations, which combine an accurate radiation-hydrodynamic solver (arepo-rt) with the well-tested IllustrisTNG galaxy formation model to self-consistently simulate both small-scale galaxy physics and large-scale reionization throughout a large patch of the universe ($L_\text{box} = 95.5\, \text{cMpc}$). This allows the formation of numerous massive haloes ($M_\text{halo} \gtrsim 10^{10}\, {\text{M}_{\odot }}$), which are often statistically underrepresented in previous studies but are believed to be important to achieving rapid reionization. We find that low-mass galaxies ($M_\text{stars} \lesssim 10^7\, {\text{M}_{\odot }}$) are the main drivers of reionization above z ≳ 7, while high-mass galaxies ($M_\text{stars} \gtrsim 10^8\, {\text{M}_{\odot }}$) dominate the escaped ionizing photon budget at lower redshifts. We find a strong dependence of fesc on the effective star formation rate (SFR) surface density defined as the SFR per gas mass per escape area, i.e. $\bar{\Sigma }_\text{SFR} = \text{SFR}/M_\text{gas}/R_{200}^2$. The variation in halo escape fractions decreases for higher mass haloes, which can be understood from the more settled galactic structure, SFR stability, and fraction of sightlines within each halo significantly contributing to the escaped flux. Dust is capable of reducing the escape fractions of massive galaxies, but the impact on the global fesc depends on the dust model. Finally, active galactic nuclei are unimportant for reionization in thesan and their escape fractions are lower than stellar ones due to being located near the centres of galaxy gravitational potential wells. 

The intrinsic alignment (IA) of observed galaxy shapes with the underlying cosmic web is a source of contamination in weak lensing surveys. Sensitive methods to identify the IA signal will therefore need to be included in the upcoming weak lensing analysis pipelines. Hydrodynamical cosmological simulations allow us to directly measure the intrinsic ellipticities of galaxies, and thus provide a powerful approach to predict and understand the IA signal. Here we employ the novel, large-volume hydrodynamical simulation MTNG740, a product of the MillenniumTNG (MTNG) project, to study the IA of galaxies. We measure the projected correlation functions between the intrinsic shape/shear of galaxies and various tracers of large-scale structure, w+g, w+m, w++ over the radial range $r_{\rm p} \in [0.02 , 200]\, h^{-1}{\rm Mpc}$ and at redshifts z = 0.0, 0.5, and 1.0. We detect significant signal-to-noise IA signals with the density field for both elliptical and spiral galaxies. We also find significant intrinsic shear–shear correlations for ellipticals. We further examine correlations of the intrinsic shape of galaxies with the local tidal field. Here we find a significant IA signal for elliptical galaxies assuming a linear model. We also detect a weak IA signal for spiral galaxies under a quadratic tidal torquing model. Lastly, we measure the alignment between central galaxies and their host dark-matter haloes, finding small to moderate misalignments between their principal axes that decline with halo mass.