The AGORA high-resolution galaxy simulations comparison project: Public data release

TL;DR

This paper presents a public release of high-resolution galaxy simulation data from the AGORA project, enabling community comparison and analysis of Milky Way-mass galaxy models across multiple simulation codes.

Contribution

It provides a standardized dataset of galaxy simulations with common initial conditions and physics models, facilitating benchmarking and collaborative research in galaxy formation.

Findings

Simulations include disk snapshots at 0 and 500 Myr with and without feedback.

Data enables comparison across nine different gravito-hydrodynamics codes.

Resources include analysis scripts for community use.

Abstract

As part of the AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project (Kim et al. 2014, 2016) we have generated a suite of isolated Milky Way-mass galaxy simulations using 9 state-of-the-art gravito-hydrodynamics codes widely used in the numerical galaxy formation community. In these simulations we adopted identical galactic disk initial conditions, and common physics models (e.g., radiative cooling and ultraviolet background by a standardized package). Subgrid physics models such as Jeans pressure floor, star formation, supernova feedback energy, and metal production were carefully constrained. Here we release the simulation data to be freely used by the community. In this release we include the disk snapshots at 0 and 500Myr of evolution per each code as used in Kim et al. (2016), from simulations with and without star formation and feedback. We encourage any member of the numerical galaxy formation community to make use of these resources for their research - for example, compare their own simulations with the AGORA galaxies, with the common analysis yt scripts used to obtain the plots shown in our papers, also available in this release.