iMaNGA: mock MaNGA galaxies based on IllustrisTNG and MaStar SSPs II the catalogue by Lorenza Nanni et al. on Wednesday 30 November

To test the current theory on galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential

to strengthening the synergy between simulations and observations. For this

reason, in our previous paper of this series, we presented a method to mock

SDSS-IV/MaNGA integral-field spectroscopic galaxy observations from

cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. Here we present the resulting

mock galaxy catalogue. This catalogue consists of 1,000 unique galaxies in

TNG50 falling into the SDSS-IV/MaNGA-Primary target footprint, defined in the

redshift and i-band absolute magnitude space, i.e. the iMaNGA sample. In this

paper, we describe the general characteristics of the catalogue, in terms of

morphology, kinematics, and stellar population properties. We also investigate

our ability to recover the galaxy characteristics, as given by the simulations,

analysing the synthetic spectra. We demonstrate that the `intrinsic' and

recovered stellar kinematics, and stellar age and metallicity are consistent

with zero within the 1$-{\sigma}$ level, for all the $\sim 8$ million tassels

in the iMaNGA sample presented in this paper. We also compare `intrinsic' and

recovered star formation histories, noting a strong resemblance. Therefore, our

mocking and spectral fitting processes do not distort `intrinsic' galaxy

properties, hence we can use these results for scientific analysis. In the

future papers of this series, we will present a comprehensive comparison and

scientific analysis of TNG50 simulations with MaNGA observational results.

arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13146v2