COSMOLOGICAL SIMULATIONS

Cosmological simulations can be used to model the evolution of galaxies and their black holes from the beginning of the universe to the present day.  I study the Romulus simulations to learn about the the connection between black holes and their hosts.  These simulations include a (25 Mpc)^3 volume (Romulus25) and a zoom-in on a 10^14 solar mass cluster (RomulusC).  These simulations carefully seed black holes based on local gas properties and correct for unresolved dynamical friction.

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We reproduced the observational result that black holes shine more efficiently in jellyfish galaxies, galaxies morphologically transformed by ram pressure stripping.  In the plot on the right, we show one example ram pressure stripped galaxy from the RomulusC simulation.  Black hole growth peaks at the end of ram pressure stripping process as the star formation rate shuts down.  In the movie below, you can watch how the black hole accretion rates (BHAR) and star formation rates (SFR) evolve as galaxies pass pericenter at time t_p.