This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr Dave and his team will use computer simulations to follow the formation of galaxies through the period 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang, when the cosmic gas was reionized by ultraviolet light from newly-formed stars and the active nuclei of galaxies. He and his team will combine an existing code that computes the motion of dark matter and gas with their recently-developed radiative transfer code. They will include a treatment of cooling below 10,000K, and implement adaptive mesh refinement for the radiative transfer calculation. The effect of star formation on the surrounding gas is calculated with a momentum-driven wind model that is tuned to match the evolution of galaxies and the gas around them at more recent times. The team will produce catalogs of simulated observations of newly-forming galaxies and the intergalactic gas. These will be made available to the community for planning observations with the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes.
A graduate student will be trained by participating in the research. Dr Dave will develop a course for non-astronomy majors on the use of astronomical data archives. This will be presented first as part of a U. Arizona Study Abroad program based at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, which he is helping to organize. The budget includes travel grants for US students, selected on the basis of minority status and academic record. Students from the University of Cape Coast will also attend.
