IQ Collaboratory III: The Empirical Dust Attenuation Framework -- Taking Hydrodynamical Simulations with a Grain of Dust

Understand

We present the Empirical Dust Attenuation (EDA) framework -- a flexible prescription for assigning realistic dust attenuation to simulated galaxies based on their physical properties.

• We use the EDA to forward model synthetic observations for three state-of-the-art large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulations: SIMBA, IllustrisTNG, and EAGLE.
• We then compare the optical and UV color-magnitude relations, $(g-r) - M_r$ and $(FUV-NUV)-M_r$, of the simulations to a $M_r < -20$ and UV complete SDSS galaxy sample using likelihood-free inference.
• Without dust, none of the simulations match observations, as expected.