I worked with Professor Alexie Leauthaud as an undergraduate
and as a masters student while at UC Santa Cruz. As an
undergraduate, I helped to remotely observe spectral data with
the Keck telescope and produced a Python pipeline to reduce that
data. As part of my masters thesis, I compared this spectral data
to the predictions of different cosmological simulations.
Breathing modes, or the movement of a galaxy's gas inward and
outward as star formation fluctuates, have been theorized as
a possible solution to the cusp-core problem of cold dark matter.
For my masters thesis, I anlyzed simulation data from the FIRE
project and new zoom simulations of dwarf galaxies from the
Romulus code, as well as spectral data observed from dwarf
galaxies.
El-Badry et al. (2017) find a correlation between star formation
rate and gas velocity in the FIRE simulations, which can be used
as an observational test of breathing modes. However, in our
Romulus zoom simulations there is no such relation.
Comparing the simulation predictions to our Keck data, we find that the Romulus simulations better predict gas velocity / star formation rate relation than the FIRE simulations.
The colored circles indicate data from the observed Keck dwarfs, and the x's represent predictions from the Romulus zooms (above) or FIRE galaxies (below). Like the Romulus zoom galaxies, our observed galaxies show no signs of a correlation between star formation rate and gas kinematics, suggesting that other processes are at work in flattening dwarf galaxy density profiles.
