[Previous] | [Session 87] | [Next]
N. C. Hearn, S. A. Lamb (University of Illinois), P. Anninos, S. D. Murray, J. M. Owen, G. Bazan (Lawrence-Livermore National Laboratory)
The presence of hot interstellar gas has been detected in the halos of a number of disk galaxies that have been involved in recent collisions or mergers. We suggest that an appreciable fraction of this hot gas could have been produced by the large-scale shocking of the interstellar medium that occurs within gaseous galactic disks during galaxy collisions. We have produced a new N-body gravity and hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation code to model the dynamics of the gaseous, stellar, and dark matter components of disk galaxies involved in collision and merger processes. This program models the thermal evolution of the gaseous component; it is capable of simulating a multiple-phase interstellar medium, and includes thermal processes such as heating from shocks. Our goal is to place limits on the amount of hot halo gas that can be produced from collision-induced shock waves as opposed to other collision-related processes such as large-scale star formation. The output of the simulation is compared with observations of collisional and merging galactic systems, including Chandra X-Ray observations of Arp 220. We acknowledge support from DOE contract LLNL B506657.
If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/collide/. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.