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

Julie Dumas被授予美国国家科学基金会天文学和天体物理学博士后奖学金，在范德比尔特大学开展研究和教育项目。Dumas将对星系之间的“飞掠相遇”进行计算模拟，这是当星系相互移动时影响星系的相互作用。与两个星系合并成一个星系的直接合并不同，飞掠相遇鲜为人知，而且计算出来的频率惊人。因此，更详细地了解飞掠相遇对于提高我们对星系如何聚集的理解至关重要。Dumas还将为一个项目的参与者举办一系列讲习班，该项目旨在为代表性不足的少数民族学生提供服务，这将帮助学生获得并加强在研究生院从事具有挑战性的计算研究所需的技能。Dumas将构建一套无碰撞和流体动力学模拟，以量化由飞掠引起的扰动，作为质量比、撞击参数和相对速度的函数，这将使她能够在广阔的飞掠相互作用空间中跟踪星系结构、运动学和形态学的总体变化。提出的研究将使Dumas能够确定飞掠是星系演化最重要的驱动因素。Dumas工作的教育部分将包括为菲斯克-范德比尔特桥项目的研究生开发一个密集的计算训练营研讨会系列。训练营将涵盖基础编程的各种主题，并将加强学生的计算技能和理解，以更好地为高级计算研究做好准备。

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.