iMaNGA: mock MaNGA galaxies based on IllustrisTNG and MaStar SSPs. I. Construction and analysis of the mock data cubes
Lorenza Nanni, Daniel Thomas, James Trayford, Claudia Maraston, Justus, Neumann, David R. Law, Lewis Hill, Annalisa Pillepich, Renbin Yan, Yanping, Chen, Dan Lazarz

TL;DR
This paper introduces a method to create realistic mock galaxy data cubes from IllustrisTNG simulations, enabling direct comparison with MaNGA observations by matching instrumental effects and spectral properties.
Contribution
The paper presents a novel approach to generate MaNGA-like mock data cubes from simulations, incorporating instrumental effects and stellar population models based on MaStar.
Findings
Intrinsic and recovered age and metallicity gradients agree within 1σ.
Star formation histories closely match between input and recovered data.
Mock data analysis demonstrates the method's effectiveness for comparison with real observations.
Abstract
Galaxy formation and evolution simulations are essential tools to probe poorly known astrophysics processes, but particular care is needed to compare simulations with galaxy observations, as observed data need to be modelled as well. We present a method to generate mock galaxies from the hydro-dynamical IllustrisTNG simulations which are suited to compare with integral field spectroscopic observation of galaxies from the SDSS-IV/MaNGA survey. Firstly, we include the same instrumental effects and procedures as adopted in the acquisition and analysis of real data. Furthermore, we generate the galaxy spectra from the simulations using new stellar population models based on the MaNGA stellar library (MaStar). In this way, our mock data cubes have the same spatial sampling, cover the same wavelength range (3600-10300 \r{A}), and share the same spectral resolution () and flux…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
