Metal flows in simulated galaxies

Wed 5th Feb 2020 @12:00 PM, level 7 Conference Room, David Caro Building
Dr Chiaki Kobayashi University of Hertfordshire

Email: c.kobayashi@herts.ac.uk

Abstract

Stars are fossils that retain the history of their host galaxies. At the end of their lives, some explode as supernovae, producing heavy elements that are distributed into the surrounding interstellar gas. New stars that are created from this gas contain the elements that were produced from the previous generations of stars. From the spatial distribution of elements, it is therefore possible to constrain the star formation and chemical enrichment histories of the galaxies. This approach, Galactic Archaeology, has been popularly used for our Milky Way Galaxy. It can also be applied to external galaxies thanks to the recent and future observations with integral field units (extra-galactic archaeology). My team has been running hydrodynamical simulations from cosmological initial conditions including detailed chemical enrichment. By comparing with observations, I will discuss the roles of metal flows, i.e., gas infall, outflow, radial flow, and stellar migration, in the evolution of Milky Way Galaxy and galaxies in general.