Speaker
Description
In the iMaNGA project we use a forward-modelling approach to directly compare predictions from hydro-dynamical cosmological simulations of galaxy formation with observations. We introduce a method to generate mock SDSS-IV/MaNGA integral-field spectroscopic galaxy observations from the simulations focusing on IllustrisTNG and TNG50. We generate a theoretical catalogue of 1,500 mock MaNGA galaxies for the direct comparison with observational results obtained with MaNGA data, investigating the dependence of radial gradients in age and metallicity on galaxy morphology, stellar mass, stellar surface mass density, and environmental density. The key point of our analysis is that the observational biases plaguing the interpretation of MaNGA data are emulated in the theoretical iMaNGA sample. It turns out that the cosmological simulations recover the basic stellar population properties, age and metallicity, well overall. We identify interesting differences between simulations and observations in some key aspects, however, that can inform further development of the simulations and their theoretical framework.
