THE AGORA HIGH-RESOLUTION GALAXY SIMULATIONS COMPARISON PROJECT. II. ISOLATED DISK TEST
- Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
- Department of Physics, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, GU2 7XH (United Kingdom)
- Centre for Theoretical Astrophysics and Cosmology, Institute for Computational Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, 8057 (Switzerland)
- Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, D-69117 Heidelberg (Germany)
- Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Theoretische Astrophysik, D-69120 Heidelberg (Germany)
- Department of Astronomy, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON L8S 4M1 (Canada)
- Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Sorbonne Universites, UPMC Univ Paris 6 et CNRS, F-75014 Paris (France)
- Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195 (United States)
- Institute of Physics, Laboratoire d’Astrophysique, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne (Switzerland)
- Particle Astrophysics Center, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL 60510 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
- Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB3 0HA (United Kingdom)
Using an isolated Milky Way-mass galaxy simulation, we compare results from nine state-of-the-art gravito-hydrodynamics codes widely used in the numerical community. We utilize the infrastructure we have built for the AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project. This includes the common disk initial conditions, common physics models (e.g., radiative cooling and UV background by the standardized package Grackle) and common analysis toolkit yt, all of which are publicly available. Subgrid physics models such as Jeans pressure floor, star formation, supernova feedback energy, and metal production are carefully constrained across code platforms. With numerical accuracy that resolves the disk scale height, we find that the codes overall agree well with one another in many dimensions including: gas and stellar surface densities, rotation curves, velocity dispersions, density and temperature distribution functions, disk vertical heights, stellar clumps, star formation rates, and Kennicutt–Schmidt relations. Quantities such as velocity dispersions are very robust (agreement within a few tens of percent at all radii) while measures like newly formed stellar clump mass functions show more significant variation (difference by up to a factor of ∼3). Systematic differences exist, for example, between mesh-based and particle-based codes in the low-density region, and between more diffusive and less diffusive schemes in the high-density tail of the density distribution. Yet intrinsic code differences are generally small compared to the variations in numerical implementations of the common subgrid physics such as supernova feedback. Our experiment reassures that, if adequately designed in accordance with our proposed common parameters, results of a modern high-resolution galaxy formation simulation are more sensitive to input physics than to intrinsic differences in numerical schemes.
- OSTI ID:
- 22661486
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 833, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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