Experimental Particle and Astro-Particle Physics Seminar
Abstract:
Supermassive black holes, residing in the centers of most if not all local but also more distant galaxies, release large amounts of energy, that can heat, ionise the surrounding gas and drive gaseous outflows producing characteristic observable features in galaxy spectra. I will give an overview how modern cosmological simulations can provide important guidance for interpreting such observational data, giving us insights into how BHs grow and to what extent BH-driven outflows affect the evolution of galaxies. With sets cosmological zoom-in simulations, adopting a kinetic wind model for black hole feedback, I further show that this process is crucial for predicting many realistic properties of massive galaxies, such as their gas composition and dynamics, their SFRs, which can be suppressed just 1 billion years after the Big Bang — consistent with recent JWST observations.
Despite this big success of modern cosmological simulations, our knowledge of the early Universe, how first black holes formed and interacted with their galaxies during the first billion years after the Big Bang, is still rather limited. Significant progress is emerging from future telescopes, such as JWST, which provides us with a wealth of high-quality spectra with emission lines of distant galaxies out to cosmic dawn. I will give some future perspectives and discuss, to what extent a novel theoretical framework, via high-resolution simulations and modelling emission lines of simulated galaxies, is indispensable for the appropriate interpretation of current and future observational spectroscopic missions. In turn, such novel observations of distant galaxies are needed to put strong constraints on still uncertain models adopted in simulations at early cosmic epochs.