The BlueTides Simulation: First Galaxies and Reionization

Understand

We introduce the BlueTides simulation and report initial results for the luminosity functions of the first galaxies and AGN, and their contribution to reionization.

• BlueTides was run on the BlueWaters cluster at NCSA from $z=99$ to $z=8.0$ and includes 2$\times$7040$^3$ particles in a $400$Mpc/h per side box, making it the largest hydrodynamic simulation ever performed at high redshift.
• BlueTides includes a pressure-entropy formulation of smoothed particle hydrodynamics, gas cooling, star formation (including molecular hydrogen), black hole growth and models for stellar and AGN feedback processes.
• The star formation rate density in the simulation is a good match to current observational data at $z\sim 8-10$.