Differences among IllustrisTNG series and a Brief Comparison with the Illustris Project

Abstract

Abstract The IllustrisTNG project is one of the most advanced cosmological gravity and magnetohydrodynamical models that simulates the formation and evolution of galaxies. It focuses on figuring out the physical processes involved based on the moving-mesh code AREPO. This project consists of three series (TNG50, TNG100, TNG300) with different box sizes, resolution, and physical parameters while each series also contains sub-simulations with lower resolution (TNG50-2, TNG50-3, TNG100-2, TNG100-3, TNG300-2, TNG300-3). The purpose of this paper is to illuminate the major differences and connections among different series of the IllustrisTNG project by analysing the data and carrying out corresponding visualization. Moreover, since the IllustrisTNG project is built upon the previous Illustris project, the improvements of the new model have been compared to the former one. Based on the analysis, different IllustrisTNG series differ in physical and numerical parameters, research areas, quantity of sample and so on. In the meantime, there are a lot of connections especially among the sub-simulations and we draw several figures, which provide a clear insight. The situation between the new model and the old one is very similar while the former introduces new methods and includes new physics which make the simulation process much more accurate. These results help to understand the ongoing problems and offer a guideline to enable the establishment of a future simulation model.