Star Formation History of Galaxies in IllustrisTNG
Kritti Sharma
17 Jan
Dear IllustrisTNG Team,
I need to construct the star-formation history of galaxies in IllustrisTNG. I've seen some discussion on the forum for this however I need help with understanding if I use the stellar birth ages and initial mass to construct the SFH, how can I account for mass lost due to feedback or gained by gas fallback, etc?
Any relevant references to read would also be very helpful!
Best regards,
Kritti Sharma
Dylan Nelson
20 Jan
The reason you want to use initial mass (i.e. GFM_InitialMass) is specifically to ignore (remove) the impact of mass loss due to stellar evolution i.e. winds and ejecta. If you want to include this, i.e. the evolving (decreasing) mass of stellar populations, you can use instead the Masses field. This is the difference between these two fields.
Kritti Sharma
20 Jan
Understood, thanks! GFM_InitialMass gives initial stellar mass of each star in a snapshot, which can be used to construct star-formation history (SFH) of the snapshot. However, I am interested in SFH on a per-galaxy basis (SFH of each galaxy in a snapshot), how can I compute that?
Dylan Nelson
20 Jan
You can use (load) only the stars of a single galaxy, then repeat the same procedure, to obtain the SFH of just that galaxy.
Dear IllustrisTNG Team,
I need to construct the star-formation history of galaxies in IllustrisTNG. I've seen some discussion on the forum for this however I need help with understanding if I use the stellar birth ages and initial mass to construct the SFH, how can I account for mass lost due to feedback or gained by gas fallback, etc?
Any relevant references to read would also be very helpful!
Best regards,
Kritti Sharma
The reason you want to use initial mass (i.e.
GFM_InitialMass) is specifically to ignore (remove) the impact of mass loss due to stellar evolution i.e. winds and ejecta. If you want to include this, i.e. the evolving (decreasing) mass of stellar populations, you can use instead theMassesfield. This is the difference between these two fields.Understood, thanks! GFM_InitialMass gives initial stellar mass of each star in a snapshot, which can be used to construct star-formation history (SFH) of the snapshot. However, I am interested in SFH on a per-galaxy basis (SFH of each galaxy in a snapshot), how can I compute that?
You can use (load) only the stars of a single galaxy, then repeat the same procedure, to obtain the SFH of just that galaxy.