What I have been doing this summer

So I started out this summer by being a TA which went well (I haven't received any death threats from my students). The rest of my summer has been focused on research, specifically learning how to model things on the computer. As of right now I have two co-advisors, one who focuses on the computation aspect of our project, and the other on the observation aspect. I am supposed to be the one that translates between the two and keeps them both up to speed on what the other is doing. In the process I learn both computation and observation (and maybe some instrumentation). So far I am learning a lot and the project I am working on seems fun.

We are focusing on two galaxies to get a good idea of what is happening in their cores in order to understand AGN and galactic blowout. What is galactic blowout? That can best be explained with a picture. This picture was taken using Hubble Space Telescope by my advisor Gerald Cecil a while back. It is an image of central region of NGC 3079.You can see the expanding bubble of gas in the middle. It is this expanding bubble that we are interested in. Notability the curvature of the filaments the source of the bubble and the circumstances that made it form. My job is to figure out a way to model this as realistically as possible.

For that I have been learning how to use a hydrodynamics code called Athena. There were other codes I could have used (like VH-1 for example) but my other advisor Fabian Heitsch recommended Athena for this type of project. So I downloaded Athena and went to work figuring out how to use it. I would say that it is a very well written code (of the little that I have used it) and that it is very intuitive and easy to learn (it's written in C). Right now I have been making up some toy models to get a good sense of how it works and what I can do with it. Recently (this week) I have been working on getting the data out and into an interesting format (one that I can show people and wow them with). On that note I have a short video for you guys.

What I have here is an extremely simple (emphasis on extremely, and simple) model of the disk of a galaxy (a constant density disk with exponential fall off to halo densities, not very realistic but for now it works). I have insterted a "starburst" in the center with an over-pressure region (luminosity/supernova) along with some wind (i.e. kinetic energy, matter outflow). The computation is only doing 2D, and is small enough that I am running it on my laptop.

Here the x-y plane represents the computaion grid (250 grid points in the x, 500 in the y). The z axis is density. I took the output from Athena and fed it into MATLAB and turned it into a movie that I am posting here. I hope you enjoy. When I have real stuff (with good physical interpretation) I will post about that.