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Forward Modeling of Large-scale Structure: An Open-source Approach with Halotools

Journal Article · · The Astronomical Journal (Online)

We present the first stable release of Halotools (v0.2), a community-driven Python package designed to build and test models of the galaxy-halo connection. Halotools provides a modular platform for creating mock universes of galaxies starting from a catalog of dark matter halos obtained from a cosmological simulation. The package supports many of the common forms used to describe galaxy-halo models: the halo occupation distribution, the conditional luminosity function, abundance matching, and alternatives to these models that include effects such as environmental quenching or variable galaxy assembly bias. Satellite galaxies can be modeled to live in subhalos or to follow custom number density profiles within their halos, including spatial and/or velocity bias with respect to the dark matter profile. The package has an optimized toolkit to make mock observations on a synthetic galaxy population—including galaxy clustering, galaxy–galaxy lensing, galaxy group identification, RSD multipoles, void statistics, pairwise velocities and others—allowing direct comparison to observations. Halotools is object-oriented, enabling complex models to be built from a set of simple, interchangeable components, including those of your own creation. Halotools has an automated testing suite and is exhaustively documented on http://halotools.readthedocs.io, which includes quickstart guides, source code notes and a large collection of tutorials. The documentation is effectively an online textbook on how to build and study empirical models of galaxy formation with Python.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL)
Sponsoring Organization:
National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Office of Science - Office of High Energy Physics
DOE Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1417046
Journal Information:
The Astronomical Journal (Online), Journal Name: The Astronomical Journal (Online) Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 154; ISSN 1538-3881
Publisher:
IOP Publishing - AAAS
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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Cited By (35)

Updated results on the galaxy–halo connection from satellite kinematics in SDSS journal June 2019
Dark Matter and HI in Ultra-Diffuse Galaxy UGC 2162 text January 2019
A fast algorithm for identifying friends-of-friends halos journal July 2017
The galaxy clustering crisis in abundance matching journal February 2018
Weak lensing reveals a tight connection between dark matter halo mass and the distribution of stellar mass in massive galaxies journal December 2019
The Swift /BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey. IX. The Clustering Environments of an Unbiased Sample of Local AGNs journal May 2018
Maturing satellite kinematics into a competitive probe of the galaxy–halo connection journal November 2018
corrfunc – a suite of blazing fast correlation functions on the CPU journal November 2019
COLOSSUS: A Python Toolkit for Cosmology, Large-scale Structure, and Dark Matter Halos journal December 2018
Tangos: the agile numerical galaxy organization system text January 2018
Phase-space Correlation in Stellar Streams of the Milky Way Halo: The Clash of Kshir and GD-1 journal November 2019
CosmoDC2: A Synthetic Sky Catalog for Dark Energy Science with LSST journal December 2019
The Astropy Project: Building an Open-science Project and Status of the v2.0 Core Package journal August 2018
Constraints on assembly bias from galaxy clustering journal February 2019
Corrfunc --- A Suite of Blazing Fast Correlation Functions on the CPU text January 2019
Calibrating the Cosmic Distance Ladder Using Gravitational-wave Observations journal November 2019
UniverseMachine: The correlation between galaxy growth and dark matter halo assembly from z = 0−10 journal May 2019
Compact groups from semi-analytical models of galaxy formation -- I: a comparative study of frequency and nature text January 2019
Compact groups from semi-analytical models of galaxy formation – I. A comparative study of frequency and nature journal December 2019
How to optimally constrain galaxy assembly bias: supplement projected correlation functions with count-in-cells statistics journal June 2019
BASILISK: Bayesian Hierarchical Inference of the Galaxy-Halo Connection using Satellite Kinematics--I. Method and Validation text January 2019
TANGOS: The Agile Numerical Galaxy Organization System journal July 2018
Maturing Satellite Kinematics into a Competitive Probe of the Galaxy-Halo Connection text January 2018
CosmoDC2: A Synthetic Sky Catalog for Dark Energy Science with LSST text January 2019
How are galaxies assigned to halos? Searching for assembly bias in the SDSS galaxy clustering text January 2016
Calibrating the cosmic distance ladder using gravitational-wave observations text January 2019
PRIMUS: Clustering of Star-forming and Quiescent Central Galaxies at 0.2 < z < 0.9 journal October 2019
Galaxy sizes and the galaxy–halo connection – I. The remarkable tightness of the size distributions journal December 2019
Basilisk: Bayesian hierarchical inference of the galaxy–halo connection using satellite kinematics – I. Method and validation journal July 2019
Towards accurate modelling of galaxy clustering on small scales: testing the standard ΛCDM + halo model journal April 2018
Clustering constraints on the relative sizes of central and satellite galaxies journal August 2019
How Are Galaxies Assigned to Halos? Searching for Assembly Bias in the SDSS Galaxy Clustering journal February 2019
Radiative transfer distortions of Lyman α emitters: a new Fingers-of-God damping in the clustering in redshift space journal August 2019
nbodykit: An Open-source, Massively Parallel Toolkit for Large-scale Structure journal September 2018
Dark matter and H i in ultra-diffuse galaxy UGC 2162 journal July 2019

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