Speaker: Stephanie Tonnesen (CCA)

Host: Jake Simon

Title: Satellites in the Circumgalactic Medium sea: A Drop in the Bucket or By the Bucketful?

Abstract: Understanding multiphase gas flows through the circumgalactic medium (CGM), the gas residing beyond a galaxy’s interstellar medium to the outskirts of its halo, is required to gain a complete picture of galaxy growth.  Simulations can be used to gain insight into the sources and survival of cold CGM gas, and in this talk, I will focus on the impact of satellite galaxies on the CGM.  Satellites bring in gas that can be deposited as a cold component to the CGM, and the subsequent evolution of the cold clouds determines whether this gas will survive long enough to accrete onto the central galaxy.  In addition, subgrid and non-thermal physics can affect the evolution of satellite gas in our simulations.  Our results point towards the possibility of using the satellite-cold gas connection to test physical processes and models used in simulations.  

Bio:

Stephanie Tonnesen joined the Flatiron Institute at the Simons Foundation in 2017 and was promoted to research scientist in 2021 at the Center for Computational Astrophysics. Her research interests lie in the fields of galaxy formation and evolution. A focus of her research is examining how a galaxy’s environment can impact its growth. To study how galaxies evolve, Tonnesen uses both cosmological simulations spanning large regions of the ‘universe’ and smaller, galaxy-scale simulations. She completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University. Before joining the foundation, Tonnesen was a Lyman Spitzer, Jr. Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and an Alvin E. Nashman Fellow at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science.