NIHAO project – I. Reproducing the inefficiency of galaxy formation across cosmic time with a large sample of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations

We introduce project Nihao (Numerical Investigation of a Hundred Astrophysical Objects), a set of 100 cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamical simulations performed using the gasoline code, with an improved implementation of the SPH algorithm. The haloes in our study range from dwarf (M200 ∼ 5 × 109 M⊙) to Milky Way (M200 ∼ 2 × 1012 M⊙) masses, and represent an unbiased sampling of merger histories, concentrations and spin parameters. The particle …