Small Statistics No More: A Suite of Galaxy Simulations to Interpret Observations

The past decade has seen tremendous progress in simulating realistic dwarf galaxies.  Despite the hype, not all dwarfs are simulated equally.  Given their shallow potential wells, dwarfs are an excellent probe of star formation and feedback processes.  In this talk, I'll outline a campaign to simulate the largest suite of dwarf galaxies to date, in environments both near the Milky Way (the DC Justice League simulations) and further afield (the Marvel simulations).  These high resolution simulations are probing dwarf galaxy formation from LMC-mass scales down into the regime of the ultra-faints for the first time.  Our realistic dwarf galaxies can be used to interpret galaxy formation and to make predictions for upcoming surveys such as LSST at the Vera Rubin Observatory. Controlled tests with the simulated dwarfs may also reveal clues about how the first stellar populations formed.

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