Modeling Nebular Emission in Cosmological Galaxy Formation Simulations

Nebular line emission diagnostics have been instrumental in studying the galaxy properties over the years. As we move into the era of next generation telescopes giving us a wider access to the high redshift universe the applicability of these diagnostics are put into question. We are working on developing a self consistent model of nebular emission using state of the art cosmological hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulation (SIMBA) and photoionization code (CLOUDY). We have adopted a novel approach where we have developed the first-ever model for calculating the nebular emission line spectrum on a particle-by-particle basis for cosmological galaxy formation simulations which is a significant step forward from more commonly-used lookup-table methods. We  have  already  developed  a  basic  framework  and  shown  in  a  pilot  study  that  it  can  reproduce  the observed SDSS-DR8 BPT curve. In this talk, I will be going over the modeling details and results from the pilot study as well as some preliminary diagnostic calibration for high redshift galaxies.