FIRE Simulations

Project summary

The FIRE: Feedback In Realistic Environments project seeks to develop and explore cosmological simulations of galaxy formation that directly resolve the interstellar medium of individual galaxies while capturing their cosmological environment. FIRE aims to improve the predictive power of galaxy formation simulations by directly informing the implementation of sub-resolution processes with explicit small-scale models, thus reducing the reliance on adjustable model parameters.

The FIRE simulations are used to address a wide array of questions in galaxy formation and intergalactic medium science, including the regulation of galaxy growth by “feedback,” the properties of galactic inflows and outflows, the morphological transformation of galaxies, the quenching of star formation in massive galaxies and the need for active galactic nucleus feedback, the escape fraction of ionizing photons from galaxies, and the effects of stellar feedback on dark matter halos.

For more details about FIRE, please see the FIRE homepage.

For full details about the public data release, see Wetzel et al. (2023).

The simulations were run using the GIZMO code (Hopkins 2015). For details about the snapshot format, please see this page.

We release FIRE-2 data under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license. If you use these data, we request that you cite as follows: “We use simulations from the FIRE-2 public data release (Wetzel et al. 2023). The FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation are part of the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project, generated using the Gizmo code (Hopkins 2015) and the FIRE-2 physics model (Hopkins et al. 2018a).

Core suite to z = 0

This suite comprises 20 simulations that zoom in on 14 Milky Way-mass galaxies, 5 SMC/LMC-mass galaxies, and 4 lower-mass galaxies including 1 ultrafaint. For each simulation, we release 39 snapshots (in HDF5 format) across z = 0 − 10.

Any publication using these data should cite the relevant paper(s) below:

Massive halos with black hole growth

This suite comprises 4 massive galaxies from Anglés-Alcázar et al. (2017) simulated to z = 1. For each simulation, we release 19 snapshots across z = 1 - 10. These halos are selected from the A-series of the FIRE-1 MassiveFIRE suite (Feldmann et al. 2016, 2017). Please refer to Feldmann et al. (2016, 2017) for information about the general selection strategy and halo growth histories of the MassiveFIRE zoom-in simulations. These halos have halo masses \(M_{\rm vir} = 10^{12-13.5} M_{\odot}\) and were simulated including massive black hole growth but no AGN feedback, resulting in overly massive galaxies with ultra-dense nuclear stellar distributions at late times (Wellons et al. 2020, Parsotan et al. 2021, Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2021).

Any publication using these data should cite Anglés-Alcázar et al. (2017).

High-z Suite

This suite comprises 22 simulations from Ma et al. (2018), Ma et al. (2019), Ma et al. (2020) simulated to z = 5. For each simulation, we release 11 snapshots across z = 5 − 10.

Data

To download snapshots and metadata, please use the Globus ID or click the link to browse a directory.

Globus ID: 5bf697d2-2616-11ec-9e35-3df4ed83d858
Display Name: FIRE public data

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