The Caterpillar Project: A Large Suite of Milky Way Sized Halos
Brendan F. Griffen, Alexander P. Ji, Gregory A. Dooley, Facundo A., G\'omez, Mark Vogelsberger, Brian W. O'Shea, Anna Frebel

TL;DR
This paper introduces the Caterpillar Project, a comprehensive suite of high-resolution simulations of Milky Way-sized dark matter halos, revealing detailed substructure and profiles crucial for understanding galaxy formation.
Contribution
It provides the largest high-resolution simulation dataset of Milky Way-sized halos, with improved substructure detection and detailed analysis of halo profiles and subhalo properties.
Findings
Resolved ~20,000 subhalos per host
Substructure mass fraction is approximately 12%
Inner halo profiles fit Einasto profiles with specific parameters
Abstract
We present the largest number of Milky Way sized dark matter halos simulated at very high mass ( M/particle) and temporal resolution (5 Myrs/snapshot) done to date, quadrupling what is currently available in the literature. This initial suite consists of the first 24 halos of the (www.caterpillarproject.org) whose project goal of 60 - 70 halos will be made public when complete. We resolve 20,000 gravitationally bound subhalos within the virial radius of each host halo. Over the ranges set by our spatial resolution our convergence is excellent and improvements were made upon current state-of-the-art halo finders to better identify substructure at such high resolutions (e.g., on average we recover 4 subhalos in each host halo above 10 M which would have otherwise not been found using conventional methods). For our…
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