Speaker
Description
Star formation is a multi-scale process which is regulated by many different environmental factors. Gravity, global and local gas dynamics, radiation and feedback processes, turbulence and magnetic fields all play a role in regulating star formation rates and the resulting star population. We attempt to further constrain the ‘star formation recipe’ by determining how the large-scale dynamics of a galaxy affect the local star formation using magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulations.
We model 16 different galaxies with the 3D moving-mesh code AREPO, including stellar feedback, live radiative transfer, non-equilibrium chemistry (including H2, H, H+, CO and C+) and magnetic fields. We do not impose an external galactic potential, instead allowing galactic structures to emerge self-consistently from initial conditions based on the PHANGS survey. Star formation is simulated with a sub-grid module which forms ‘star particles’ with photoionising and supernova feedback mechanisms.
To find how star formation varies in different conditions, we zoom into distinct galactic environments, such as in the spiral arms, in the central molecular zone and in the outer galaxy, with an improved ‘zoom-in’ method which allows us to follow a region as it evolves within the wider galaxy. This method increases the resolution in a chosen region while retaining the rest of the galaxy at the original resolution to capture the effect of large-scale dynamics on small-scale star formation.
By zooming in to multiple regions of our 16 galaxy models, we will analyse how star formation varies as a function of environmental parameters such as the gas surface density, magnetic field strength, orbital timescale, local free-fall time and dynamical equilibrium pressure.
| Stream | Science or Engineering |
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