Synthetic Gaia DR3 Surveys from the FIRE Cosmological Simulations of Milky Way-mass Galaxies

Nguyen et al., available on arXiv

Abstract: The third data release (DR3) of Gaia has provided a fivefold increase in the number of radial velocity measurements of stars, as well as a stark improvement in parallax and proper motion measurements. To help with studies that seek to test models and interpret Gaia DR3, we present nine Gaia synthetic surveys, based on three solar positions in three Milky Way-mass galaxies of the Latte suite of the FIRE-2 cosmological simulations. These synthetic surveys match the selection function, radial velocity measurements, and photometry of Gaia DR3, adapting the code base Ananke, previously used to match the Gaia DR2 release by Sanderson et al. The synthetic surveys are publicly available and can be found at http://ananke.hub.yt/. Similarly to the previous release of Ananke, these surveys are based on cosmological simulations and thus are able to model nonequilibrium dynamical effects, making them a useful tool in testing and interpreting Gaia DR3.