TY - JOUR
T1 - Semi-analytic forecasts for Roman – the beginning of a new era of deep-wide galaxy surveys
AU - Yung, L. Y.Aaron
AU - Somerville, Rachel S.
AU - Finkelstein, Steven L.
AU - Behroozi, Peter
AU - Davé, Romeel
AU - Ferguson, Henry C.
AU - Gardner, Jonathan P.
AU - Popping, Gergö
AU - Malhotra, Sangeeta
AU - Papovich, Casey
AU - Rhoads, James E.
AU - Bagley, Micaela B.
AU - Hirschmann, Michaela
AU - Koekemoer, Anton M.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors of this paper would like to thank David Spergel, Stephen Wilkins, Mark Dickinson, Austen Gabrielpillai, Shengqi Yang, Nicole Drakos, Stephen Wilkins, and Madeline Marshall for useful discussions. We also thank the members of the Roman Space Telescope Cosmic Dawn Science Investigation Team and the Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and uv Research (CASTOR) Science Team for utilizing the pre-production results and providing feedback that improved this work. We thank the anonymous referee for the constructive comments that improved this work. The simulations and data products for this work were run on NASA computing machines, astera and seliana, managed by the Office of Scientific Computing at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. We thank the Center for Computational Astrophysics (CCA) and the Scientific Computing Core (SCC) at the Flatiron Institute for hosting the data associated with this work on the data release portal Flathub. We warmly thank Dylan Simon and Elizabeth Lovero for coordinating the data release portal and project website, and Rebecca Sesny for the creation of the project website. AY is supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by the Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA. AY also thanks the CCA for hospitality during the creation of this work. RSS acknowledges support from the Simons Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)
PY - 2023/2/1
Y1 - 2023/2/1
N2 - The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next flagship observatory, will redefine deep-field galaxy survey with a field of view two orders of magnitude larger than Hubble and an angular resolution of matching quality. These future deep-wide galaxy surveys necessitate new simulations to forecast their scientific output and to optimize survey strategies. In this work, we present five realizations of 2-deg2 light cones, containing a total of ≳25 million simulated galaxies with −16 ≳ MUV ≳ −25 spanning z ∼ 0 to 10. This data set enables a new set of experiments with the impacts of survey size on the derived galaxy formation and cosmological constraints. The intrinsic and observable galaxy properties are predicted using a well-established, physics-based semi-analytic modelling approach. We provide forecasts for number density, cosmic SFR, field-to-field variance, and angular two-point correlation functions, and demonstrate how the future wide-field surveys will be able to improve these measurements relative to current generation surveys. We also present a comparison between these light cones and others that have been constructed with empirical models. The mock light cones are designed to facilitate the exploration of multi-instrument synergies and connecting with current generation instruments and legacy surveys. In addition to Roman, we also provide photometry for a number of other instruments on upcoming facilities, including Euclid and Rubin, as well as the instruments, that are part of many legacy surveys. Full object catalogues and data tables for the results presented in this work are made available through a web-based, interactive portal.
AB - The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next flagship observatory, will redefine deep-field galaxy survey with a field of view two orders of magnitude larger than Hubble and an angular resolution of matching quality. These future deep-wide galaxy surveys necessitate new simulations to forecast their scientific output and to optimize survey strategies. In this work, we present five realizations of 2-deg2 light cones, containing a total of ≳25 million simulated galaxies with −16 ≳ MUV ≳ −25 spanning z ∼ 0 to 10. This data set enables a new set of experiments with the impacts of survey size on the derived galaxy formation and cosmological constraints. The intrinsic and observable galaxy properties are predicted using a well-established, physics-based semi-analytic modelling approach. We provide forecasts for number density, cosmic SFR, field-to-field variance, and angular two-point correlation functions, and demonstrate how the future wide-field surveys will be able to improve these measurements relative to current generation surveys. We also present a comparison between these light cones and others that have been constructed with empirical models. The mock light cones are designed to facilitate the exploration of multi-instrument synergies and connecting with current generation instruments and legacy surveys. In addition to Roman, we also provide photometry for a number of other instruments on upcoming facilities, including Euclid and Rubin, as well as the instruments, that are part of many legacy surveys. Full object catalogues and data tables for the results presented in this work are made available through a web-based, interactive portal.
KW - astronomical data base: surveys
KW - galaxies: evolution
KW - galaxies: formation
KW - galaxies: high-redshifts
KW - galaxies: star formation
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stac3595
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stac3595
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85149139068
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 519
SP - 1578
EP - 1600
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 1
ER -