Hello All!
I am having some trouble understanding the interplay between a few gas fields, namely ('gas', 'density'), ('gas', 'cell_mass'), and ('gas', 'cell_volume'). Looking at the O/H ratios at various radii for some galaxies has lead me to some confusion in how to properly convert between these .
I am using a script like this to construct a sphere of a given radius (here 10% of the virial radius) and find the mass of the gas within it:
###BEGIN SCRIPT import yt
ds = yt.load('/Volumes/My Passport for Mac/VELAhalos_4_1_2021/GEN6/VELA07_snap/10MpcBox_csf512_a0.500.d')
x = ds.quan(19.97536, 'Mpccm/h') y = ds.quan(19.58991, 'Mpccm/h') z = ds.quan(20.38296, 'Mpccm/h')
center = [x,y,z]
radius = yt.YTQuantity(185.12684881603383 , 'kpc')
sp_10percent = ds.sphere(center, radius * 0.1)
gas_density, gas_volume, gas_mass = sp_10percent.quantities.total_quantity([('gas', 'density'), ('gas', 'cell_volume'), ('gas', 'cell_mass')])
##END SCRIPT
This script returns these values:
gas_density = 11770623025851.596 Msun/kpc**3 gas_volume = 26575.843162683213 kpc**3 gas_mass = 15826330839.340445 Msun
Now, from what I understood, the gas_mass field is derived from the gas_density * gas_volume (from this page https://yt-project.org/doc/reference/field_list.html). However, doing that calculation returns a value around 10^16 Msun, not anywhere close to the 10^9 value returned by the cell_mass field. I am wondering the proper way to manually convert from the gas_density to the cell_mass field, and I am clearly missing something in my understanding. I would like to be able to do this outside of yt for convenience as the 'art', 'Metal_Density_SNII' field only returns a density, and not a mass, which I would like to study, so where do I look to find the proper conversion? Or is my understanding of one of the above fields lacking in some way?
Thank you for your time and convience!