Simulations of galaxy formation and evolution
Abstract:
Cosmological simulations are the most general and extensive tools for the theoretical study of how galaxies in the Universe form and co-evolve. They are becoming progressively more realistic thanks to the continuous progress in physical fidelity, numerical accuracy and computing power.
In this lecture, we want to provide an overview of the galaxy-physics simulations currently available in the field by highlighting aspects of both their physical foundations as well as of the underlying numerical techniques. The most complete simulations nowadays entail the solution of the equations of gravity, magneto-hydrodynamics, radiative transfer and the coupled formula for star formation and other "baryonic" processes in an expanding Universe and within gravitationally-collapsing structures, like filaments, sheets and dark-matter haloes. They hence require the numerical implementation of e.g. N-body techniques for collisionless and collisional systems and the solution of fluid or magneto-hydro dynamics with particle-based or mesh-based techniques. But they also attempt to consistently and simultaneously model processes like the hierarchical growth of structures and the return of material, energy and momentum from supernova and super massive black holes.
We will go through a subset of those ingredients, run small simulations on the laptops with publicly available codes (like Gadget or Ramses) and learn how to analyse and visualise aspects of the simulation output.