Understand
This paper introduces EGG, the Empirical Galaxy Generator, a tool designed within the ASTRODEEP collaboration to generate mock galaxy catalogs for deep fields with realistic fluxes and simple morphologies.
- The simulation procedure is based exclusively on empirical prescriptions -- rather than first principles -- to provide the most accurate match with observations at 0<z<7.
- In particular, we consider that galaxies can be either quiescent or star-forming, and use their stellar mass (M*) and redshift (z) as the fundamental properties from which all the other observables can be statistically derived.
- Drawing z and M* from the observed galaxy stellar mass functions, we associate a star formation rate (SFR) to each galaxy from the tight SFR-M* main sequence, while dust attenuation, optical colors and morphologies (including bulge-to-total ratios, sizes and aspect ratios) are obtained from empirical relations that we establish from the high quality Hubble and Herschel observations available in the CANDELS fields.