The SELGIFS data challenge: Generating synthetic observations of CALIFA galaxies from hydrodynamical simulations

In this work we present a set of synthetic observations that mimic the properties of the integral field spectroscopy (IFS) survey Calar Alto Legacy Integral-Field Area (CALIFA), generated using radiative transfer techniques applied to hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies in a cosmological context. The simulated spatially-resolved spectra include stellar and nebular emission, kinematic broadening of the lines, and dust extinction and scattering. The results of the radiative transfer simulations have been post-processed to reproduce the main properties of the CALIFA V500 and V1200 observational setups. The data has been further formatted to mimic the CALIFA survey in terms of field-of-view size, spectral range and sampling. We have included the effect of the spatial and spectral point spread functions affecting CALIFA observations, and added detector noise after characterizing it on a sample of 367 galaxies. The simulated data cubes are suited to be analysed by the same algorithms used on real IFS data. In order to provide a benchmark to compare the results obtained applying IFS observational techniques to our synthetic data cubes and test the calibration and accuracy of the analysis tools, we have computed the spatially-resolved properties of the simulations. Hence, we provide maps derived directly from the hydrodynamical snapshots or the noiseless spectra, in a way that is consistent with the values recovered by the observational analysis algorithms. Both the synthetic observations and the product data cubes are public and can be found in the collaboration website http://astro.ft.uam.es/selgifs/data challenge/.© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society.
We thank the reviewer for their useful comments and suggestions, which have helped to improve the article in several respects. Most importantly, we are grateful for the encouragement to implement the CALIFA dithering pattern into our pipeline. We thank Michael Aumer for providing his simulations, P.-A. Poulhazan and P. Creasey for sharing the new chemical code, and Elena Terlevich for useful comments on the manuscript. GG and CS acknowledge support from the Leibniz Gemeinschaft, through SAW-Project SAW-2012-AIP-5 129, and from the High-Performance Computer in Bavaria (SuperMUC) through Project pr94zo. YA, CS, JC, and GG acknowledge support from the DAAD through the Spain-Germany Collaboration programm PPP-Spain-57050803. The 'Study of Emission-Line Galaxies with Integral-Field Spectroscopy' programme (SELGIFS, FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IRSES-612701) is funded by the Research Executive Agency (REA, EU). YA is supported by contract RyC-2011-09461 of the Ramon y Cajal programme (Mineco, Spain). JC has been financially supported by the 'Research Grants - Short-Term Grants, 2016' (57214227) promoted by the DAAD. JC and YA also acknowledge financial support from grant AYA2013-47742-C4-3-P [and AYA2016-79724-C4-1-P] (Mineco, Spain). RGB acknowledges support from the Spanish Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, through projects AYA2014-57490-P and AYA2016-77846-P. LG was supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under Grant AST-1311862. PSB acknowledges support from the BASAL Center for Astrophysics and Associated Technologies (PFB-06). JC would like to thank the 'Galaxy and Quasars' research group at the Leibniz-Institut fur Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP) for the useful discussions and constructive feedback. This study uses data provided by the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey (http://califa.caha.es/), based on observations collected at the Centro Astronomico Hispano Aleman (CAHA) at Calar Alto, operated jointly by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Astronomie and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC).