THESAN-HR: How does reionization impact early galaxy evolution?

Understand

Early galaxies were the radiation source for reionization, with the photoheating feedback from the reionization process expected to reduce the efficiency of star formation in low mass haloes.

• Hence, to fully understand reionization and galaxy formation, we must study their impact on each other.
• The THESAN project has so far aimed to study the impact of galaxy formation physics on reionization, but here we present the new THESAN simulations with a factor 50 higher resolution ($m_{\rm b} \approx 10^4$~M$_\odot$) that aim to self-consistently study the back-reaction of reionization on galaxies.
• By resolving haloes with virial temperatures $T_{\rm vir} < 10^4$~K, we are able to demonstrate that simplistic, spatially-uniform, reionization models are not sufficient to study early galaxy evolution.