2016/06/21 by Stickley, Nathaniel R., Capak, Peter, Masters, Daniel +3
#Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1606.06374
Highly accurate models of the galaxy population over cosmological volumes are necessary in order to predict the performance of upcoming cosmological missions. We present a data-driven model of the galaxy population constrained by deep 0.1-8 \rm μm imaging and spectroscopic data in the COSMOS survey, with the immediate goal of simulating the spectroscopic redshift performance of the proposed SPHEREx mission. SPHEREx will obtain over the full-sky R∼41 spectrophotometry at moderate spatial resolution (∼6") over the wavelength range 0.75-4.18 \rm μm and R∼135 over the wavelength range 4.18-5 \rm μm. We show that our simulation accurately reproduces a range of known galaxy properties, encapsulating the full complexity of the galaxy population and enables realistic, full end-to-end simulations to predict mission performance. Finally, we discuss potential applications of the simulation framework to future cosmology missions and give a description of released data products.