The MassiveBlack-II simulation: the evolution of haloes and galaxies to z ∼ 0

We investigate the properties and clustering of halos, galaxies and blackholes to z = 0 in the high resolution hydrodynamical simulation MassiveBlack-II (MBII). MBII evolves a ΛCDM cosmology in a cubical comoving volume Vbox = (100Mpc/h)³. It is the highest resolution simulation of this size which includes a self-consistent model for star formation, black hole accretion and associated feedback. We provide a simulation browser web application which enables interactive search and tagging of the halos, subhalos and their properties and publicly release our galaxy catalogs to the scientific community. Our analysis of the halo mass function in MBII reveals that baryons have strong effects with changes in the halo abundance of 20–35% below the knee of the mass function (Mhalo 1013.2 M⊙ h at z = 0) when compared to dark-matter-only simulations. We provide a fitting function for the halo MF out to redshift z = 11 and discuss its limitations.