Dr. Oscar Agertz, assoc. sen. university lecturer at the Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics at Lund University. Photo: Lena Björk Blixt.
In this seminar I will discuss the ongoing effort in modelling the formation of extended spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.
I will review the advances made in the past few years within the galaxy simulation community, with an emphasis on the coupling between feedback from individual massive stars and the interstellar medium.
I will present new results from the "VINTERGATAN project" on the emerging chemo-dynamical structure of simulated galaxies, and outline why these may hold the promise of unravelling the formation of the Milky Way.
Visualisation from the VINTERGATAN supercomputer simulation (see the video). The disc of a Milky Way mass galaxy is forming from cosmic accretion along filaments (blue). The insets show mock HST images of the galaxy at z > 3 (top) at z = 1.5 (middle) and at z < 1 (bottom). Credits: Agertz et al. (2020), Renaud et al. (2020), Renaud et al. (2020).