Image of Alice in Wonderland at the Mad Hatter's tea party You are cordially invited to afternoon tea and biscuits wine and chocolate

Astronomy Tea Talks at Caltech

Mondays, Hameetman auditorium (Cahill)
Tea:  4.00pm
Talk: 4.15pm

Organized by:

2010 - 2011 season:
11 October 2010 Ji-hoon Kim (Stanford)

'Galaxy Formation with Self-consistently Modeled Stars and Massive Black Holes: Towards An Unabridged Understanding of Their Coevolution'

While there is now an abundance of evidence suggesting the coevolution of galaxies and their embedded massive black holes (MBHs), a comprehensive astrophysical understanding which incorporates both galaxies and MBHs is still missing. To tackle the highly nonlinear process of galaxy - MBH interaction, a self-consistent numerical approach is imperative. Yet, most of the simulations so far have only used approximated ways of modeling stars and MBHs with parametrized sub-resolution recipes. In order to simulate the actual physical processes, I develop a fully self-consistent galaxy formation simulation integrating the growth of galaxies and MBHs in one comprehensive framework. The high-resolution adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code Enzo not only models the formation and feedback of molecular clouds at a spatial scale of 15.2 pc, but also simulates the gas accretion onto a MBH and two major channels of MBH feedback: radiative feedback (monochromatic X-ray photons followed by full 3D ray tracing) as well as mechanical feedback (bipolar jets resolved in shock-capturing AMR). I will present the first results from the investigations on (1) the coevolution of a 1012 Msun galaxy and its embedded MBH at z~3, and (2) the binary mergers of two disk galaxies of 2 1011 Msun each. I will also discuss the implications of my improved numerical tool and future projects.
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Last modified on 20th Jul 2011 by Dominik A. Riechers.  

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