Tier II Chair in Astronomy

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How do the billions of stars that form a galaxy come together to form the beautiful spiral structures that we see? Over the next decade observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission will provide exquisite new observations of stellar motions to help us understand the structure and motion of the Milky Way. At the same time, new simulation models of galactic evolution are necessary to interpret these data. The first part of this research program outlines an ambitious simulation program using parallel computers that will improve mass resolution by a factor of 1000 over typical models used today. This increase in resolution will provide an entirely new level of fidelity in numerical modelling and should contribute to a radical new understanding of the structure and evolution of the Milky Way. The second part of the research program will focus on the precise role of black holes in galaxy formation, and how the enormous energy release associated with the accretion of matter impacts the formation of galaxies. This is a problem that taxes both theoretical and numerical approaches.