Gas cooling in simulations of the formation of the galaxy population

We compare two techniques for following the cooling of gas and its condensation into galaxies within high‐resolution simulations of cosmologically representative regions. Both techniques treat the dark matter using N ‐body methods. One follows the gas using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) while the other uses simplified recipes from semi‐analytic (SA) models. We compare the masses and locations predicted for dense knots of cold gas (the ‘galaxies’) when the two techniques are applied to evolution from the same initial conditions and when the additional complications of star formation and feedback are ignored. We find that above the effective resolution limit of the two techniques, they give very similar results both for global quantities such as the total amount of cooled gas and for the properties of individual ‘galaxies’. The SA technique has systematic uncertainties arising from the simplified cooling model adopted, while details of the SPH implementation can produce substantial systematic variations in the galaxy masses it predicts. Nevertheless, for the best current SPH methods and the standard assumptions of the SA model, systematic differences between the two techniques are remarkably small. The SA technique gives adequate predictions for the condensation of gas into ‘galaxies’ at less than one per cent of the computational cost of obtaining similar results at comparable resolution using SPH.