(circle marks the location of apparent radial truncation)
Where do galaxies end?
(circle marks the location of apparent radial truncation)
My current project is to try and determine
what defines the outer edges of galactic disks and what they can tell us about
the evolution of disk galaxies. I run computer simulations
to investigate how galactic dynamics, star formation, gas
properties and other factors might affect the distribution of matter
in the galaxy.
Having access to our new supercomputer,
Robert has
been crucial in the past few months, as it nicely
complemented my use of national supercomputing
facilities on the TeraGrid.
Using Robert, I am able to prepare large
production runs, and therefore make more efficient use of
TeraGrid resources. This work has been presented at different meetings:
Related papers/preprints:
Currently, I am running several million-particle simulations of isolated
galaxies forming from dissipational collapse. Some of the simulations are
running on Lonestar,
a 50-Teraflop cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.
Below is a movie of our fiducial simulation. Most of it has been performed on our
STF-sponsored cluster Robert.
(click on the image to see the movie)
