High-resolution synthetic UV-submm images for Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies from the ARTEMIS project

TL;DR

This paper provides high-resolution, dust-aware synthetic images of Milky Way-mass galaxies from the ARTEMIS simulation, enabling detailed comparison with observations and previous simulations across multiple wavelengths.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive post-processing pipeline for ARTEMIS galaxies to produce realistic synthetic images from UV to sub-mm, and compares these to observed and other simulated galaxies.

Findings

ARTEMIS galaxies generally reproduce observed flux and property scaling relations

Dust extinction at UV wavelengths is underestimated in the simulations

Simulated galaxies are more clumpy and less symmetrical than observed galaxies

Abstract

We present redshift-zero synthetic dust-aware observations for the 45 Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies of the ARTEMIS project, calculated with the SKIRT radiative transfer code. The post-processing procedure includes components for star-forming regions, stellar sources, and diffuse dust. We produce and publicly release realistic high-resolution images for 50 commonly-used broadband filters from ultraviolet to sub-millimetre wavelengths and for 18 different viewing angles. We compare the simulated ARTEMIS galaxies to observed galaxies in the DustPedia database with similar stellar mass and star formation rate, and to synthetic observations of the simulated galaxies of the Auriga project produced in previous work using a similar post-processing technique. In all cases, global galaxy properties are derived using SED fitting. We find that, similar to Auriga, the post-processed ARTEMIS galaxies generally reproduce the observed scaling relations for global fluxes and physical properties, although dust extinction at FUV/UV wavelengths is underestimated and representative dust temperatures are lower than observed. At a resolved scale, we compare multi-wavelength non-parametric morphological properties of selected disc galaxies across the data sets. We find that the ARTEMIS galaxies largely reproduce the observed morphological trends as a function of wavelength, although they appear to be more clumpy and less symmetrical than observed. We note that the ARTEMIS and Auriga galaxies occupy adjacent regions in the specific star formation versus stellar mass plane, so that the synthetic observation data sets supplement each other.