Abstract

Hydrodynamical cosmological simulations are one of the most powerful tools to study the formation and evolution of galaxies and their central black holes in the fully non-linear regime. Despite several recent successes in simulating Milky Way look-alikes, self-consistent, ab-initio models are still a long way off. In this talk I will briefly review numerical and physical uncertainties plaguing current state-of-the-art cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. I will then present global properties of galaxies and black holes as obtained with novel cosmological simulations, the so-called Illustris project, and discuss which feedback mechanisms are needed to reproduce realistic stellar masses and galaxy morphologies in the present day Universe. In the second part of the talk I will discuss novel ways how to model black hole physics on small scales and how to incorporate these methods in large-scale cosmological simulations.