The Assembly of Galaxy Disks and Spheroids

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The observations with Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a population of galaxies as massive as our own Milky Way with a dominant disk component already in place at redshift z = 1 (approximately 60% of the cosmic lookback time), suggesting that such galaxies were assembled early in the history of the Universe. The Principal Investigator and his team will use numerical N-Body simulations with high resolution and physical details to study the formation of stellar disks and spheroids over a large baseline of masses and cosmic ages. Their focus will be on a small number of very high-resolution simulations of galaxy formation in a fully cosmological context. This project is aimed to: (1) Predict when the present-day massive galaxies were formed and assembled and the relative number density of star-burst events over continuous star forming galaxies in the very early Universe, (2) Predict how and when the disks of galaxies like our Milky Way were formed and acquired their angular momentum, and (3) Predict the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and compare them with the data from current and future space missions.The Investigators will collaborate with University of Washington's "Pre-Major in Astronomy" (Pre-MAP) program, provide funding for undergraduate students involved in Pre-MAP and devise suitable research projects. They will also provide tutoring and training to graduate students and postdoctoral associates involved in this research project.