Simulating the Diversity of Dwarfs

The Milky Way hosts number of small satellite galaxies. Although these range in stellar mass by ~5 orders of magnitude, their dark matter haloes have very similar masses. They also exhibit heterogeneous star formation histories, with many showing multiple star formation bursts. The physical origins of the differences between dwarfs include both internal and external effects. The goal of this project is to develop theoretical models and associated numerical codes to study these effects and hence understand the diverse properties of dwarf galaxies.

The numerical models will be publicly released as optimised, open-source modules for Xeon/Xeon Phi architectures which can be used to include additional physics in large-scale simulations of galaxy formation.