* Astronomy

Title: MoLUSC: A MOck Local Universe Survey Constructor
Author: T. Sousbie, H. Courtois, G. Bryan, J. Devriendt

This paper presents MoLUSC, a new method for generating mock galaxy catalogues from a large scale (~=1000³ Mpc³) dark matter simulation, that requires only modest CPU time and memory allocation. The method uses a small-scale (~=256³ Mpc³) dark matter simulation on which the GalICS semi-analytic code has been run in order to define the transformation from dark matter density to galaxy density transformation using a probabilistic treatment. MoLUSC is then applied to a large-scale dark matter simulation in order to produce a realistic distribution of galaxies and their associated spectra. This permits the fast generation of large-scale mock surveys using relatively low-resolution simulations. We describe various tests which have been conducted to validate the method, and demonstrate a first application to generate a mock Sloan Digital Sky Survey redshift survey.

Read more (1128kb, PDF)