April 29
I Dream of Disks: Quantifying Disk Structure in the DREAMS Cosmological Simulations
Speaker: Carrie Filion, CCA, Flatiron Institute
Abstract: How do baryons and dark matter work in tandem to shape the galaxies that we observe? Cosmological simulations can provide critical insight into this question, but simulation predictions even from modern state-of-the-art suites are hindered by a number of uncertain parameters choices for both the baryonic physics and the dark matter models. The DaRk mattEr and Astrophysics with Machine learning and Simulations (DREAMS) project aims to constrain these uncertain parameters by producing and analysing thousands of Milky Way-mass cosmological zoom-in simulations that vary a number of poorly constrained inputs. The resulting data represent a unique opportunity to investigate the interplay between the light and dark sectors and their respective roles in the formation and evolution of disk galaxies like the Milky Way. However, analysing and providing insight into the disk structures within these thousands of galaxies presents unique challenges and motivates a novel common analysis framework. Basis function expansions offer a natural solution, as they enable the production of homogeneously-derived, tailored metrics to define and quantify disk structures and their evolution. While basis function expansions have been used to characterize dark matter haloes in cosmological simulations, their use for cosmological disks has remained relatively unexplored. We are remedying this disparity and establishing a new analysis framework for basis function expansions conditioned on analytic disk distributions. In this talk, I outline this work and present early results that adopt this methodology to analyse cosmological stellar disks in over a thousand DREAMS cold dark matter universes.
Host: Ankita Bera