Simulating the Past: Creating Testable Predictions of the Milky Way's Assembly History Using Numerical Experiments

Details Simulating the Past: Creating Testable Predictions of the Milky Way's Assembly History Using Numerical Experiments Simulating the Past: Creating Testable Predictions of the Milky Way's Assembly History Using Numerical Experiments

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21911403b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #114.03

Statistics

Scientific paper

Current and next generation surveys of the Milky Way promise to revolutionize our observational perspective of the Galaxy. My dissertation uses a suite of N-body and SPH simulations of disk galaxies to make testable predictions of the assembly history of the Milky Way and identify observational probes that take advantage of the forthcoming data. APOGEE, an infrared survey of the Galaxy and a component of the SDSS-III, will measure the distance, radial velocity, and multi-element chemistry of 105 stars located throughout the Galaxy, making it particularly well suited for comparison with simulations. Our initial investigation explores how the minor mergers expected in Lambda-CDM and inherent properties of stellar disks affect the dynamics of stellar radial migration- an essential ingredient in understanding the evolution of the Milky Way and disk galaxies in general. We discover that the resonances and mechanisms responsible for migration are different in isolated and satellite-bombarded galaxies, resulting in distinct migration patterns and potential observational signatures of accretion events. Continuing our development of tools to describe the chemo-dynamics of the disk, we construct statistics to measure overdensities and characterize outliers in the distance, radial velocity projection of phase space. I discuss mock APOGEE observations of our numerical simulations and demonstrate that our statistics can discriminate between significant galaxy formation mechanisms given the data available in the near term. Galaxy formation theory faces the exciting challenge of an unprecedented level of statistical scrutiny: imminent and ongoing surveys such as SEGUE, RAVE, APOGEE, LAMOST, and HERMES offer an extraordinary opportunity to unravel the formation history of the Milky Way.

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