Follow the links below to view visualizations of both the gas and stars (or one or the other individually) of the Milky Way-mass galaxies in the FIRE-2 sample, or scroll down to view all of them side-by-side. Right click any video on this or any linked page to download the video in full resolution.
Stars & gas, side by side Stars only Gas only Gas on the Local Group-scale
The final link shows visualizations of the gas around the Local Group-like pairs.
All galaxies, side by side
These movies place each of the MW-mass galaxies in FIRE-2 (as of roughly summer 2017) alongside one another. The galaxies are ordered by decreasing "diskiness" (defined in Garrison-Kimmel et al., 2018a) at redshift zero.
Pseudo-color visualizations of the stars
Visualizations of the gas, colored by the temperature
These movies are zoomed-out relative to the stars, making the initial cosmological expansion far more obvious. The red in the movies corresponds to hot gas (>106K), the magneta indicates gas below 104K, and the remainder is shown in green. m12z was simulated before the self-shielding prescription for FIRE-2 was finalized, and therefore adopts a slightly different scheme than the remainder of the galaxies. While the difference is visually obvious due to the sharp color cuts used in the movies, it has a negligible impact on the physical evolution of the system as only diffuse gas is afftected.
Placing the gas and stars side by side