Data release of UV to submm broadband fluxes for simulated galaxies from the EAGLE project

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive set of dust-attenuated and dust emission fluxes for simulated galaxies from the EAGLE project, enabling realistic synthetic observations across ultraviolet to sub-millimeter wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed post-processing pipeline using SKIRT to generate broadband fluxes for a large sample of simulated galaxies, including a publicly available Python framework.

Findings

Nearly half a million simulated galaxies with resolved dust properties.

Fluxes cover UV to sub-mm wavelengths, accounting for dust effects.

Data set complements existing intrinsic galaxy properties from EAGLE.

Abstract

We present dust-attenuated and dust emission fluxes for sufficiently resolved galaxies in the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, calculated with the SKIRT radiative transfer code. The post-processing procedure includes specific components for star formation regions, stellar sources, and diffuse dust, and takes into account stochastic heating of dust grains to obtain realistic broad-band fluxes in the wavelength range from ultraviolet to sub-millimeter. The mock survey includes nearly half a million simulated galaxies with stellar masses above 10^8.5 solar masses across six EAGLE models. About two thirds of these galaxies, residing in 23 redshift bins up to z=6, have a sufficiently resolved metallic gas distribution to derive meaningful dust attenuation and emission, with the important caveat that the same dust properties were used at all redshifts. These newly released data complement the already publicly available information about the EAGLE galaxies, which includes intrinsic properties derived by aggregating the properties of the smoothed particles representing matter in the simulation. We further provide an open source framework of Python procedures for post-processing simulated galaxies with the radiative transfer code SKIRT. The framework allows any third party to calculate synthetic images, SEDs, and broadband fluxes for EAGLE galaxies, taking into account the effects of dust attenuation and emission.