COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH in BOSTON and BEYOND (CRIBB)

Date	December 1, 2023
Speaker	Drummond Fielding (Flatiron Institute)
Topic	Bridging the Divide: A Multi-Scale Approach To Galaxy Formation
Abstract	Galaxies lie at the nexus of modern astrophysical pursuits. They are an essential cosmological probe, and set the environment in which stars form and compact objects merge. As such, galaxies are crucial to all of astrophysics, and yet our grasp of how they evolve is incomplete. The key lies in understanding the complicated balance between inflows and outflows that shape galaxies and regulate the amount of fuel available for star formation and black hole growth. Understanding these galactic gas flows has, to date, been inhibited by the seemingly insurmountable range of spatial and temporal scales inherent to the governing processes. I will describe our efforts to bridge this vast range of scales and illuminate the principles underlying galaxy formation. I will cover how micro-scale (~sub-pc) processes, such as turbulent mixing and radiative cooling, connect with meso-scale (~kpc) processes, such as supernova-driven galactic winds, and how—when combined using a novel cosmological multi-scale model that we call Arkenstone—they shape the macro-scale (~Mpc) galactic properties and dynamics. Taken together, these efforts aim to usher in a new era of truly predictive galaxy modeling.

Acknowledgements

We thank the generous support of MIT IS&T, CSAIL, and the Department of Mathematics for their support of this series.