Probing New Physics in Galaxy Formation at Ultra-High Resolution

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A wealth of exciting new observational projects promise to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy and star formation: from the LSST and Gaia measuring Milky Way stellar populations in game-changing detail, to the James Webb Space Telescope probing galaxies during cosmic "first light", while the Hubble telescope identifies the long-"missing" mass in the medium around galaxies. This project intends to run large-scale cosmological hydrodynamic simulations on Blue Waters to make detailed predictions and leverage these transformative observations. The simulations will support the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) project, a network of theorists at 13 institutions, including several NSF postdoctoral and graduate student fellows: this collaboration has developed new, fully-cosmological simulations of galaxy formation that explicitly follow a diverse range of physics. This project will carry out novel studies of galaxy formation by running cosmological simulations on Blue Waters with unprecedented resolution and physics. The project run a large suite of cosmological simulations, targeting galaxies from the faintest dwarfs through the Milky Way, at the ultra-high resolution and realism required to leverage the next-generation of observations. The petascale resources of Blue Waters will allow the project to resolve each galaxy with ~1 billion particles and follow them self-consistently over their entire history in live cosmological settings. These simulations will model the physics of galaxy formation with unprecedented realism, uniquely incorporating not only all of the important stellar feedback mechanisms (radiation pressure, photo-heating, stellar winds, supernovae), but also magnetic fields, physical (anisotropic) Braginskii conduction and viscosity, passive scalar (metal) diffusion, and explicit, multi-wavelength radiation hydrodynamics. This represents the culmination of several years of work supported by NSF, and will be critical to enable the science of the FIRE project. The project will support an outreach component involving high school students and teachers, and undergraduate students, as well as a large science team using these simulations. The simulations will be used to make predictions specifically for next-generation observatories including (but not limited to): JWST, LSST, Gaia, and HST, in order to test theories of galaxy and star formation, constrain the origin of the heavy elements in the Universe, the re-ionization history of the early Universe, the effects of fundamental plasma physics in the circum and inter-galactic medium, and the nature of cold dark matter.