Peta-Cosmology: galaxy formation and virtual astronomy

Kentaro Nagamine, University of Nevada-Las Vegas

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Renyue Cen, Kentaro Nagamine, John Wise, Manisha Gajbe, Jun-Hwan Choi, Robert Thompson, Jason Jaacks, Mohammadtaher Safarzadeh, Amit Kashi, Ludwig Oser, Keita Todoroki, Taysun Kimm, Lile Wang

Although significant advances have been made in understanding the overall cosmological framework of the Universe, theoretical predictions on when and how galaxies form remain crude and non-definitive. For example, we do not yet understand how the bimodality in color distribution of galaxies arises, and what physical processes make the faint-end of the galaxy luminosity function flat. It is difficult to understand galaxy formation, because many physical processes are involved simultaneously; e.g., collapse and radiative cooling of dissipative baryonic gas, photoionization by the UV background radiation, star formation and feedback from supernova explosions.

Cosmological hydrodynamic simulations are capable of making testable predictions, which are confronted by a multitude of observational constraints. Predictive and falsifiable computations of the type proposed here are highly demanded by the current vast observational database, provided by HST, Chandra, Spitzer, GALEX, and ground-based telescopes. These observations paint a very complex picture yet to be made coherent under a unified framework.

http://www.physics.unlv.edu/~kn