How the hearts of galaxies change during galaxy merging

Chi-Hong (Sanctity) Lin^1,2*, Ke-Jung (Ken) Chen¹, Chorng-Yuan Hwang²

¹Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
²Graduate Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, Taoyuan, Taiwan

* Presenter:Chi-Hong (Sanctity) Lin, email:chihonglin@asiaa.sinica.edu.tw

Galaxy mergers are crucial processes in galaxy evolution, and they hold the key to connect galactic astronomy to cosmology through the hierarchical structure formation, which predicts that galaxy merger pairs undergoing a significant transitional stage of rapid supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth. However, we cannot observe the entire process of any merger events, which take longer than a few billion years, so the only way to study the physics of galaxy mergers is by means of numerical simulations. The hydrodynamics simulation code we used is called GIZMO, which is appropriate to model the processes of the complicated galaxy interactions and SMBH growth. We simulate these galaxies with physical parameters from observational results (e.g. HST, ALMA) and run our simulations on powerful supercomputers. By performing a suite of simulations with different physical conditions, we can investigate the coevolution between SMBHs and their host galaxies.

Keywords: Galactic Astronomy, Hydrodynamics Simulation, Galaxy Evolution