Introducing the Illustris Project: the evolution of galaxy populations across cosmic time

Understand

We present an overview of galaxy evolution across cosmic time in the Illustris Simulation.

• Illustris is an N-body/hydrodynamical simulation that evolves 2*1820^3 resolution elements in a (106.5Mpc)^3 box from cosmological initial conditions down to z=0 using the AREPO moving-mesh code.
• The simulation uses a state-of-the-art set of physical models for galaxy formation that was tuned to reproduce the z=0 stellar mass function and the history of the cosmic star-formation rate density.
• We find that Illustris successfully reproduces a plethora of observations of galaxy populations at various redshifts, for which no tuning was performed, and provide predictions for future observations.