Astronomers have created a mechanism that accurately simulates the birth of galaxies

When modeling the appearance of galaxies, many factors need to be taken into account. They are influenced by processes

associated with star formation and cosmicradiation, gas cooling in the interstellar medium, feedback from black hole accretion, magnetic fields, etc. Astronomers have used computer simulations of galaxy formation to help understand the interaction of these processes. This, in turn, will help answer questions about how the first galaxies in the Universe formed.

With the current development of surveillance technology inin such a case are useless. Modeling the formation of galaxies requires a self-consistent reconstruction of all cosmic mechanisms simultaneously. The key difficulty is that each of them operates on a different spatial scale, which makes it almost impossible to correctly build all processes at the same time.

CfA astronomers Rahul Kannan and Lars Hernqvist cotheir colleagues have developed a new computational mechanism that consistently includes all cosmic effects. The calculations use a new stellar feedback structure "Stars and Multiphase Gas in Galaxies" (SMUGGLE), which combines processes associated with radiation, dust, gaseous molecular hydrogen (the dominant component of the interstellar medium), and also includes thermal and chemical modeling. SMUGGLE is included in the popular AREPO hydrodynamic code, which simulates the evolution of structures.

We present a new structure forself-consistent modeling of the effects of radiation fields, dust physics and molecular chemistry in the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies. The model combines a state-of-the-art radiation hydrodynamics module with a nonequilibrium H and He thermochemistry module that accounts for H₂ in conjunction with an empirical model of dust formation and destruction. All of them are integrated into the new SMUGGLE star feedback structure. 

Study authors

Astronomers have tested the new simulation onthe Milky Way galaxy and reported excellent agreement with observations. The scientists plan to expand their work to simulations with even finer spatial resolution.

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