Publicly available FIRE-2 simulations


License and citing

We release FIRE-2 data under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license.

If you use these data, we request that you cite as follows:

"We use the publicly-available FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations (Wetzel et al. 2023, 2025) from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project, generated using the Gizmo code (Hopkins 2015) and the FIRE-2 physics model (Hopkins et al. 2018)."

We also request users to cite the individual published article(s) that introduced each simulation used, as listed in Tables 1, 2, 3 in Wetzel et al. (2023) for the simulations first released in Data Release 1, or as listed in Wetzel et al. (2025) for the simulations first released in Data Release 2.


Contents

core/
* Core suite to z = 0
* 20 simulations comprising 14 Milky Way-mass galaxies, 5 SMC/LMC-mass galaxies, and 4 lower-mass galaxies
* 601 snapshots
* halo/galaxy catalogs and merger trees across all snapshots
* particle tracking (with 3-D formation coordinates for stars) across all snapshots

physics variations for a subset of Core simulations to z = 0

    dm_only/
    * Dark Matter Only
    * 19 simulations, 61 snapshots
    * halo catalogs and merger trees across all ~600 snapshots

    reionize_later/
    * Later Reionization
    * 4 simulations, 601 snapshots
    * halo/galaxy catalogs, merger trees, and particle tracking across all snapshots

    mhd/
    * MHD+
    * 16 simulations, 61 snapshots
    * m12f, m12i, m12m have more snapshots and halo/galaxy catalogs with merger trees and particle tracking

    cosmic_ray/
    * Cosmic Ray
    * 14 simulations, 61 snapshots
    * m12f, m12i, m12m have all 601 snapshots and halo/galaxy catalogs with merger trees and particle tracking

massive_halo/
* Massive Halo suite to z = 1
* 8 simulations
* 278 snapshots
* halo/galaxy catalogs across almost all snapshots

high_redshift/
* High Redshift suite to z = 5
* 34 simulations: 22 to z = 5, 6 to z = 7, 6 to z = 9
* halo/galaxy catalogs across all snapshots

boxes/
* dark-matter-only cosmological boxes to z = 0
* 4 simulations
* used to generate initial conditions for zoom-in simulations
* halo catalogs across all snapshots, merger trees for L172


Documentation

FlatHUB website
https://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/fire

Documentation of FIRE-2 Data Release 1 (Wetzel et al. 2023)
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2023ApJS..265...44W/abstract

Documentation of FIRE-2 Data Release 2 (Wetzel et al. 2025)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06608

Description of the FIRE-2 physics model (Hopkins et al. 2018)
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018MNRAS.480..800H/abstract

Description of the publicly-available Gizmo code (Hopkins 2015)
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.450...53H/abstract
http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/GIZMO.html

Further documentation of the contents of Gizmo snapshots
http://www.tapir.caltech.edu/~phopkins/Site/GIZMO_files/gizmo_documentation.html#snaps-snaps

FIRE website
https://fire.northwestern.edu