Submillimetre galaxies in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations – an opportunity for constraining feedback models

Abstract

Submillimetre galaxies (SMGs) have long posed a challenge for theorists, and self-consistently reproducing the properties of the SMG population in a large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulation has not yet been achieved. In this work, we employ a relatively simple method based on previous work to predict the submm flux densities of simulated SMGs drawn from cosmological simulations from the Illustris and IllustrisTNG projects and compare the predicted number counts with observations. We find that the predicted SMG number counts based on IllustrisTNG are significantly less than observed (more than 1 dex at $S_{850} \\gtrsim 4$ mJy). The simulation from the original Illustris project yields more SMGs than IllustrisTNG: the predicted counts are consistent with those observed at both $S_{850} \\lesssim 5$ mJy and $S_{850} \\gtrsim 9$ mJy and only a factor of $\\sim 2$ lower than observed at intermediate flux densities. We demonstrate that IllustrisTNG hosts fewer SMGs than Illustris because in the former, high-mass ($M_{\\star} \\sim 10^{11} \\, {\\rm M}_{\\odot}$) $z \\sim 2-3$ galaxies have lower dust masses and star formation rates (SFRs) than in Illustris owing to differences in the sub-grid models for stellar or/and active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback between the two simulations (we unfortunately cannot isolate the specific cause(s) post hoc). Our results demonstrate that because our method enables predicting SMG number counts in post-processing with a negligible computational expense, SMGs can provide useful constraints for tuning sub-grid models in future large-volume cosmological simulations. Higher resolution, which would lead to stronger SFR enhancements in starbursts, could at least partially reconcile the discrepancy between the IllustrisTNG SMG number counts and those observed.