From Particles to Pixels: How many particles do I really need to construct stellar kinematic mock observational measurements?

This work considers the impact of resolution in the construction of mock observations of simulated galaxies.

In particular, when building mock integral field spectroscopic observations from galaxy formation models in cosmological simulations, we investigate the possible systematics that may arise given the assumption that all galaxies above some stellar mass limit will provide unbiased and meaningful observable stellar kinematics.

We build a catalogue of N-body simulations to sample the range of stellar particle resolutions within the EAGLE Ref0050N0752 simulation box and examine how their observable kinematics vary relative to a higher-resolution N-body control.

We use these models to compile a table of the minimum number of particles-per-pixel to reach a given uncertainty in the fitted line-of-sight velocity distribution parameters.

Further, we introduce a Voronoi-binning module to the mock observation code, SimSpin, in order to meet these minimum numbers.

Using EAGLE, we show the impact of this shot noise on the observed spin-ellipticity plane and the recovery of this space when observations are binned with increasing numbers of particles.

In conclusion, we advise binning mock images to meet at least 200 particles-per-pixel to avoid systematically under-estimating the velocity dispersion along a given line-of-sight.

We demonstrate that this is important for comparing galaxies extracted from the same simulation, as well as between simulations of varying mass resolution and observations of real galaxies.

;Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures (including 3 pages of appendix with 2 figures).

Accepted 2024 November 3 for publication in MNRAS.

Received 2024 October 28; in original form 2024 August 9