The Three Hundred project: a large catalogue of theoretically modelled galaxy clusters for cosmological and astrophysical applications

TL;DR

The Three Hundred project provides a comprehensive dataset of 324 simulated galaxy clusters, comparing their properties with observations and semi-analytical models to aid cosmological and astrophysical research.

Contribution

It offers a large, publicly available catalogue of hydrodynamically simulated galaxy clusters with detailed analysis of their properties and comparison to observations and models.

Findings

Modelled clusters agree with observations on baryonic fractions and gas relations at z=0.

Central galaxies tend to be too massive in the models.

Galaxy colours are bluer than observed by about 0.2 dex.

Abstract

We introduce the THE THREE HUNDRED project, an endeavour to model 324 large galaxy clusters with full-physics hydrodynamical re-simulations. Here we present the data set and study the differences to observations for fundamental galaxy cluster properties and scaling relations. We find that the modelled galaxy clusters are generally in reasonable agreement with observations with respect to baryonic fractions and gas scaling relations at redshift z = 0. However, there are still some (model-dependent) differences, such as central galaxies being too massive, and galaxy colours (g - r) being bluer (about 0.2 dex lower at the peak position) than in observations. The agreement in gas scaling relations down to 10^{13} h^{-1} M_{\odot} between the simulations indicates that particulars of the sub-grid modelling of the baryonic physics only has a weak influence on these relations. We also include - where appropriate - a comparison to three semi-analytical galaxy formation models as applied to the same underlying dark-matter-only simulation. All simulations and derived data products are publicly available.