Public data release of the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation

Andrew Wetzel, Christopher C. Hayward, Robyn E. Sanderson, Xiangcheng Ma, Daniel Angles-Alcazar, Robert Feldmann, T. K Chan, Kareem El-Badry, Coral Wheeler, Shea Garrison-Kimmel, Farnik Nikakhtar, Nondh Panithanpaisal, Arpit Arora, Alexander B. Gurvich, Jenna Samuel, Omid Sameie, Viraj Pandya, Cameron Hummels, Sarah Loebman, Michael Boylan-Kolchin, James S. Bullock, Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere, Dusan Keres, Eliot Quataert, Philip F. Hopkins

Published 2022-02-14Version 1

We describe a public data release of the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation, available at flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire, from the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project. The FIRE-2 simulations achieve parsec-scale resolution to explicitly model the multi-phase interstellar medium while implementing direct models for stellar evolution and feedback, including stellar winds, core-collapse and Ia supernovae, radiation pressure, photoionization, and photoelectric heating. We release complete snapshots from 3 suites of simulations. The first comprises 20 simulations that zoom in on 14 Milky Way-mass galaxies, 5 SMC/LMC-mass galaxies, and 4 lower-mass galaxies, including 1 ultra-faint galaxy; we release snapshots at z = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4. The second comprises 4 more massive galaxies simulated to z = 1, with snapshots at z = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Finally, a high-redshift suite comprises 22 simulations at z = 5 and 6. Each simulation also includes dozens of resolved lower-mass (satellite) galaxies in the zoom-in region around each primary galaxy. Each snapshot includes all stored properties for all dark matter, gas, and star particles, including 11 elemental abundances for stars and gas, and formation times (ages) of star particles. We also release accompanying halo catalogs, which include galaxy properties and member star particles. For the Milky Way-mass simulations, we release an 'ex-situ' flag for each star particle at z = 0, as well as catalogs of stellar streams and multipole basis expansion models for the halo mass distributions. We list several publicly available python packages for reading and analyzing these simulations.