The next frontier for massive galaxies and quasars at the Cosmic Dawn

Tiziana Di Matteo, Carnegie Mellon University

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Detecting and understanding the first galaxies and black holes (BHs) one of the major current observational and theoretical challenges in galaxy formation. The first billion years of the cosmic history of our Universe is is a pivotal time for cosmic structure formation.  The first galaxies and BHs set the stage:  the radiation from the first galaxies and black holes shapes the thermal evolution of the intergalactic medium, ionizing the neutral plasma making the Universe transparent to UV radiation. The radiative and kinetic feedback exerted by stars and supernovae, as well as by Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) powered by the first BHs shapes the interstellar medium, influencing how the following generations of stars and BHs evolve in turn. 

Our team has led the development of cosmological codes optimized to Petascale/Blue Waters facilities and used these resources to understand how supermassive BHs and galaxies formed, from the smallest to the rarest and most luminous.  With close to one trillion particles, we have carried out the BlueTides simulation on Blue Waters.  BlueTides has been run successfully on the entire set of compute nodes on Blue Waters using the latest version of our MP-Gadget code. BlueTides is the only simulation in the whole field of cosmology that is able to make direct contact with, and predictions for, the current and next generation of astronomical telescopes. 

Here we are proposing to increase the unique legacy value of the BlueTides simulation and run it further to complete the first billion years of cosmic history.  BT is a yet unparalleled achievement: no other cosmological simulation, either limited by volume covered or resolution, can make direct contact with current and upcoming observations of galaxies and the rare first quasars. 

We have been asked by many members of the community (on both the observational and theoretical side) whether we can please run the BT dataset further. They and we can see that with the enormously increasing rate of discovery of galaxies and quasars that the BT dataset will continue to have tremendous value, which will increase dramatically as it evolves into the later Universe.

We will make these gains by following the evolution of these first galaxies and quasars to predict what their counterparts should be in the regime where the current frontier observational constraints are arriving. This will enable us to assemble the first statistical samples of galaxies and quasars that cover the full first billion years of cosmic history.