Evolution of the Small Galaxy Population From High Redshift to the Present

Thomas Quinn, University of Washington

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Thomas Quinn, Fabio Governato, Gengbin Zheng, Lukasz Wesolowski, Akhil Langer, Ferah Munshi, Harshitha Gopalakrishnan Menon, Lauren Anderson, Michael Tremmel, Andrew Pontzen

The current cosmological model of a Dark Energy plus Cold Dark Matter (CDM) is now well established, but a continuing challenge is to connect the photons we observe (i.e. the stars in galaxies) to the dark matter structures predicted by the theory. This requires the inclusion of a host of astrophysical processes including gas dynamics, star formation, and energy input from various astrophysical sources such as supernovae, massive stars and active galactic nuclei. The inclusion of such physics is even more crucial when interpreting observations of high redshift galaxies, since the additional constraints of kinematics and detailed star formation histories are not available as they are for local galaxies. A well established methodology for making the light-halo connection is semi-analytic modeling, where the growth of halos in a dark matter-only simulation is augmented with simple sets of rules describing gas cooling and star formation. However, star formation is obviously a complex process intimately connected to the gas dynamics. This project will extend a successful gas dynamical modeling of individual galaxies to a cosmologically relevant volume in order to increase the predictive power of the CDM model.

 

 

http://librarian.phys.washington.edu/astro/index.php/Research:ChaNGa