No Arabic abstract
We track the angular momentum transfer in n-body simulations of barred galaxies by measuring torques to understand the dynamical mechanisms responsible for the evolution of the bar-disc-dark matter halo system. We find evidence for three distinct phases of barred galaxy evolution: assembly, secular growth, and steady-state equilibrium. Using a decomposition of the disc into orbital families, we track bar mass and angular momentum through time and correlate the quantities with the phases of evolution. We follow the angular momentum transfer between particles and identify the dominant torque channels. We find that the halo model mediates the assembly and growth of the bar for a high central density halo, and the outer disc mediates the assembly and growth of the bar in a low central density halo model. Both galaxies exhibit a steady-state equilibrium phase where the bar is neither lengthening nor slowing. The steady-state equilibrium results from the balance of torque between particles that are gaining and losing angular momentum. We propose observational metrics for barred galaxies that can be used to help determine the evolutionary phase of a barred galaxy, and discuss the implications of the phases for galaxy evolution as a whole.
We study the mechanisms and evolutionary phases of bar formation in n-body simulations of a stellar disc and dark matter halo system using harmonic basis function expansion analysis to characterize the dynamical mechanisms in bar evolution. We correlate orbit families with phases of bar evolution by using empirical orthogonal functions that act as a spatial filter and form the gravitational potential basis. In both models we find evidence for three phases in evolution with unique harmonic signatures. We recover known analytic results, such as bar slowdown owing to angular momentum transfer. We also find new dynamical mechanisms for bar evolution: a steady-state equilibrium configuration and harmonic interaction resulting in harmonic mode locking, both of which may be observable. Additionally, we find that ellipse fitting may severely overestimate measurements of bar length by a factor of two relative to the measurements based on orbits that comprise the true backbone supporting the bar feature. The bias will lead to overestimates of both bar mass and bar pattern speed, affecting inferences about the evolution of bars in the real universe, such as the fraction of bars with fast pattern speeds. We propose a direct observational technique to compute the radial extent of trapped orbits and determine a dynamical length for the bar.
We interpret simulations of secularly-evolving disc galaxies through orbit morphology. Using a new algorithm that measures the volume of orbits in real space using a tessellation, we rapidly isolate commensurate (resonant) orbits. We identify phase-space regions occupied by different orbital families. Compared to spectral methods, the tessellation algorithm can identify resonant orbits within a few dynamical periods, crucial for understanding an evolving galaxy model. The flexible methodology accepts arbitrary potentials, enabling detailed descriptions of the orbital families. We apply the machinery to four different potential models, including two barred models, and fully characterise the orbital membership. We identify key differences in the content of orbit families, emphasising the presence of orbit families indicative of the bar evolutionary state and the shape of the dark matter halo. We use the characterisation of orbits to investigate the shortcomings of analytic and self-consistent studies, comparing our findings to the evolutionary epochs in self-consistent barred galaxy simulations. Using insight from our orbit analysis, we present a new observational metric that uses spatial and kinematic information from integral field spectrometers that may reveal signatures of commensurabilities and allow for a differentiation between models.
We build a theoretical picture of how the light from galaxies evolves across cosmic time. In particular, we predict the evolution of the galaxy spectral energy distribution (SED) by carefully integrating the star formation and metal enrichment histories of semi-analytic model (SAM) galaxies and combining these with stellar population synthesis models which we call mentari. Our SAM combines prescriptions to model the interplay between gas accretion, star formation, feedback process, and chemical enrichment in galaxy evolution. From this, the SED of any simulated galaxy at any point in its history can be constructed and compared with telescope data to reverse engineer the various physical processes that may have led to a particular set of observations. The synthetic SEDs of millions of simulated galaxies from mentari can cover wavelengths from the far UV to infrared, and thus can tell a near complete story of the history of galaxy evolution. keywords{galaxies: evolution - galaxies: stellar content - galaxies.}
The formation of bars in disk galaxies is a tracer of the dynamical maturity of the population. Previous studies have found that the incidence of bars in disks decreases from the local Universe to z ~ 1, and by z > 1 simulations predict that bar features in dynamically mature disks should be extremely rare. Here we report the discovery of strong barred structures in massive disk galaxies at z ~ 1.5 in deep rest-frame optical images from CANDELS. From within a sample of 876 disk galaxies identified by visual classification in Galaxy Zoo, we identify 123 barred galaxies. Selecting a sub-sample within the same region of the evolving galaxy luminosity function (brighter than L*), we find that the bar fraction across the redshift range 0.5< z < 2 (f_bar = 10.7 +6.3 -3.5% after correcting for incompleteness) does not significantly evolve. We discuss the implications of this discovery in the context of existing simulations and our current understanding of the way disk galaxies have evolved over the last 11 billion years.
Bottom-up coarse-grained molecular dynamics models are parameterized using complex effective Hamiltonians. These models are typically optimized to approximate high dimensional data from atomistic simulations. In contrast, human validation of these models is often limited to low dimensional statistics that do not necessarily differentiate between the CG model and said atomistic simulations. We propose that explainable machine learning can directly convey high-dimensional error to scientists and use Shapley additive explanations do so in two coarse-grained protein models.