Quantifying the Effects of Flyby Encounters on Galaxy Assembly and Developing the Computational Skillset of Incoming Graduate Students

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Julie Dumas is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Vanderbilt University. Dumas will undertake computational simulations of "flyby encounters" between galaxies, which are interactions that affect galaxies as they move past each other. Unlike direct mergers in which two galaxies combine to form one galaxy, flyby encounters are poorly understood, and are also calculated to be surprisingly frequent. A more detailed understanding of flyby encounters is thus essential to advancing our understanding of how galaxies are assembled. Dumas will also develop a series of workshops for the participants of a program that serves underrepresented minority students, which will help the students acquire and strengthen the skills needed to undertake challenging computational research in graduate school.Dumas will construct a suite of collisionless and hydrodynamic simulations to quantify the perturbation induced by flyby encounters as a function of mass ratio, impact parameter, and relative velocity, which would allow her to track bulk changes in galaxy structure, kinematics, and morphology over a broad flyby interaction space. The proposed studies would allow Dumas to identify the flybys that are the most important drivers of galaxy evolution. The educational component of Dumas' work will consist of developing an intensive Computational Bootcamp workshop series for incoming graduate students within the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge program. The Bootcamp will cover a variety of topics on basic programming, and will be geared toward strengthening the computational skillset and understanding of the students to better prepare them for advanced computational research.