Galacticus: A Semi-Analytic Model of Galaxy Formation

Understand

We describe a new, free and open source semi-analytic model of galaxy formation, Galacticus.

• The Galacticus model was designed to be highly modular to facilitate expansion and the exploration of alternative descriptions of key physical ingredients.
• We detail the Galacticus engine for evolving galaxies through a merging hierarchy of dark matter halos and give details of the specific implementations of physics currently available in Galacticus.
• Finally, we show results from an example model that is in reasonably good agreement with several observational datasets.