Investigations of ram pressure stripping in realistic cluster environments with a multiphase ISM

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AST-0908390BryanThis award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Interactions between the interstellar medium (ISM) of a disk galaxy and the intracluster medium (ICM) of a massive cluster of galaxies will strip gas from infalling galaxies and can lead to color and morphological changes. These interactions can be used as a probe of both ISM and ICM physics. A recent wealth of new data includes observed tails and wakes, and although simulations have shed some light, much remains to be understood, including a mismatch between the predicted and observed width of wakes, the way in which dense, molecular gas is stripped, and the fate of the stripped gas. To answer these questions, this project will increase the realism of stripping simulations, first by adding radiative cooling to idealized galaxies with constant density and velocity winds, using a high-resolution, adaptive-mesh refinement hydrocode. Secondly, those systems will be placed in realistic cosmological simulations of cluster formation and evolution. Finally, the team will add important extra physical processes such as viscosity, heat conduction and magnetic fields into their simulations. Every stage will stress direct observational comparisons.The work will form the core of a PhD thesis, includes a number of projects suitable for undergraduate students, and will involve New York high school teachers and students through the Science Research Training Program. The growing realism of simulations enables high-quality visualizations to convey up-to-date research results to students and the general public, as the PI has done before, in collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the American Museum of Natural History.