Graduate Program Events |
Events on Monday, May 12th, 2025
- Spring Semester Grading deadline
- Abstract: *Note: actual end time may vary.*
- The Magellanic System: The Clouds and their circumgalactic medium within a cosmological context
- Time: 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- Place: B343 Sterling or
- Speaker: Robin Chisholm, Physics PhD student
- Abstract: Despite tremendous strides in our understanding of the Magellanic Clouds -the closest and most massive dwarf galaxies to the Milky Way (MW)- many questions, especially regarding their circumgalactic medium (CGM), remain open. We characterize the warm CGM of an isolated dwarf galaxy pair with properties similar to the Magellanic Clouds prior to their infall into a MW-mass halo, in the HESTIA cosmological simulations. The massive dwarf hosts a warm coronal gas envelope with a temperature of T ~ 3 x 10^5 K, consistent with expectations for virialized CGM in dwarf halos. Tidal interactions produce a neutral gas stream that extends over ~ 150 kpc, with an HI mass of ~ 10^8 M⊙, similar to the Magellanic Stream. Furthermore, in the Hestia simulation suite, we find that coronal gas is ubiquitous in all halos with M > 10^11 M⊙, implying that massive dwarfs generically develop extended gaseous envelopes prior to accretion. This result has significant implications for the survival of neutral tidal structures, and suggests that current and future high-ion UV absorption-line observations are indicative of warm coronae surrounding LMC-mass dwarfs, independent of their environment. We conclude by discussing future plans to further our understanding of the Magellanic System by running a suite of isolated simulations to constrain the Small Magellanic Cloud's orbital histories.
- Host: Elena D'Onghia