Synthetic Gaia surveys from the FIRE cosmological simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies

Understand

With Gaia Data Release 2, the astronomical community is entering a new era of multidimensional surveys of the Milky Way.

• This new phase-space view of our Galaxy demands new tools for comparing observations to simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies in a cosmological context, to test the physics of both dark matter and galaxy formation.
• We present ananke, a framework for generating synthetic phase-space surveys from high-resolution baryonic simulations, and use it to generate a suite of synthetic surveys resembling Gaia DR2 in data structure, magnitude limits, and observational errors.
• We use three cosmological simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies from the Latte suite of the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project, which feature self-consistent clustering of star formation in dense molecular clouds and thin stellar/gaseous disks in live cosmological halos with satellite dwarf galaxies and stellar halos.