Roadmap for the Project

Get initial galaxy data

  1. Choose 2 galaxies to follow their history
    • massive elliptical
    • beautiful spiral
  2. Find their merger history
    • Get sub_halo_id number for each galaxy for each of the 135 snapshots
    • Assume that the merger history continues along the line of largest merger participant
  3. Decide what data will be interesting
    • Star formation rate
    • Filter magnitudes
    • Particle positions
      • Particle sizes too (if available)
    • Mass of particle
      • Total mass
      • Dark matter mass
      • Gas mass
      • Star mass
  4. Decide which particles in the sub-halo “belong” to the galaxy at the centre of the sub-halo
    • Do we decide on a star-mass density limit? Or combined star+gas mass density limit
    • Do we use a luminosity (density) limit?

Pull data from illustris database

  1. Write function to get the above mentioned data for a galaxy at a particular snapshot
  2. Save the data somewhere in a coherent naming scheme
  3. Decide, based on query/download speed whether to download data again every
    time the scripts are run, or whether to save the data in cache and load from disk (i.e. astropy.download_file(url=..., cache=True))

Make “ideal” mock 2D maps/images of galaxy

“Ideal” maps/images mean what the galaxy would look like before a telescope was used to observe it. This could mean we display the stellar mass of the galaxy in an image, or actually use the intensity of a galaxy in a given filter band (UVIKgriz). We also want to be able to view the galaxy from any angle

  1. Function to display an integrated 2D “column-density”-style map of the galaxy for any set of rotation angles

  2. Function to automaticaly determine the semi-major and -minor axes of the sub-halo ellipsoid

  3. Function to rotate particle positions to the following orientations:
    • Face on - view of largest and 2nd largest axes
    • Edge on - view of largest and smallest axes
    • End on - view of smallest and 2nd smallest axes

    This could be done with a principle component analysis

  1. Function to make maps of the following of each galaxy for each of the three main orientations:
    • Flux intensity in each of the UVRIgriz filters
    • Star formation rate
    • Stellar mass
    • Gas + stellar mass
    • Dark matter
  2. Function to generate these maps on-the-fly and return a fits image at a giving spatial angular resolution, given a snapshot distance (i.e. lookback time)
  1. Combine this funtionality into a python package
    • Write the appropriate tests, and documentation

Time for the fun stuff:

  1. Generate these maps for each of the snapshots of a galaxy
    • Create GIFs of the evolution of the galaxy over cosmic time
    • Create these maps for a fixed viewing angle
    • Create these maps oriented along one of the principle axes
  2. Plot integrated parameters over the whole galaxies vs cosmic time (snapshot and lookback time)
    • Each of the parameters listed in 4.