A new generation of exciting ongoing and upcoming observational projects are targeted to near-field cosmology and galactic archaeology of the milky way (MW), including its stellar disk, its extended…

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) awarded a $394,195 grant to the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to conduct research related to galactic archaeology and the formation history of the Milky Way. The grant supports running and analyzing next-generation cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies, including generating realistic synthetic star catalogs and mock surveys from these simulations. This research aims to address key science questions about how observational data can constrain the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way halo and be used to reconstruct the 3D formation history of the Milky Way system. The grant will also enable the public release of these simulation-derived datasets to provide the scientific community with theoretical tools for interpreting current and upcoming Milky Way survey data. This grant does not have a set-aside designation.

A new generation of exciting ongoing and upcoming observational projects are targeted to near-field cosmology and galactic archaeology of the milky way (MW), including its stellar disk, its extended stellar halo, and its satellite dwarf galaxies. HST, jwst, wfirst, and gaia, together with lsst and multiple ground-based spectroscopic surveys, are poised to measure 3D positions, 3D velocities, photometric colors, and multi-species elemental abundances for hundreds of millions of STARS in/around the MW. These unprecedented datasets are poised to revolutionize our understanding of the MW's formation, promising an ERA of precision galaxy formation. However, the critical challenge in leveraging these ambitious observational campaigns remains the lack of sufficiently realistic and detailed theoretical modeling tools to predict and interpret these observations. This proposal focuses on running and analyzing the next generation of state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of mwlike galaxies, including generating realistic synthetic star catalogs and mock MW surveys from these simulations, to address two key science questions of galactic archaeology: 1) how can these observations constrain the distribution of dark matter throughout the MW halo, including its radial dependence and its triaxiality? 2) how can these observations be used to reconstruct the 3D formation history of the MW system, including the formation of the stellar halo from destroyed satellite dwarf galaxies and the mixing/migration of stellar populations within the disk? This project will incorporate several unique aspects for impact and utility within the scientific community. This work will support analyzing and further developing the new latte simulation suite, the highest-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of MW-like galaxies to date, which use the state-of-the-art feedback in realistic environments (fire) model for star formation and feedback. Because latte simulations have demonstrated success in reproducing key aspects of the MW system---including mwlike thin+thick disk morphology, realistic populations of satellite dwarf galaxies, and realistic stellar halos---they enable theoretical modeling of the stellar populations of a MW galaxy as a holistic system in a live cosmological setting. This project will involve building the computational tools needed to translate latte (or any other) hydrodynamic simulation outputs into synthetic catalogs and mock surveys of individual STARS, which can be read and analyzed in the same way as observational datasets, thus enabling direct comparisons. These mock star catalogs, together with full simulation snapshots, will be made publicly available, in user-friendly databases, to providing to the scientific community the much needed theoretical tools for interpreting current and upcoming MW surveys.