CAREER: Pushing the frontiers of galaxy evolution modeling with multi-scale and empirically-constrained hydrodynamic simulations

The investigator explores how galaxies, supermassive black holes (SMBHs), and the Universe's large-scale structures form and change over time. At the centers of many galaxies are SMBHs, which are billions of times heavier than our Sun and can influence their surrounding galaxies. This research team will develop computer simulations that will lead to a better understanding of galaxies, SMBHs, and the Universe itself. This research will help answer fundamental questions, like how dark matter and dark energy influence the evolution of the Universe. This research will inspire students and the public while creating new opportunities for learning. This project will also support research mentorship programs, computer programming workshops, and a public planetarium show. Through integrated educational and outreach components, this project will also significantly enhance STEM education, ensuring its benefits extend beyond the research program. The investigator will overcome the limitations of current cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy formation by focusing on two key areas: (1) advancing physically predictive models of galaxies at sub-parsec resolution and (2) developing computationally efficient, large-scale simulations that incorporate baryonic physics while satisfying observational constraints. In the first research area, the investigator will integrate detailed interstellar medium physics from the FIRE-3 model with new Lagrangian hyper-refinement techniques to explicitly resolve sub-parsec scale accretion onto SMBHs and multi-channel AGN feedback. This will allow the project to address major questions about the coevolution of SMBHs and galaxies, create synthetic observations to interpret astrophysical data across cosmic time, and develop initial conditions for super-zoom simulations that explore accretion disk properties under varying host galaxy conditions. In the second research area, the investigator will develop a hybrid simulation framework that for the first time leverages empirical galaxy-halo models to enhance the computational efficiency and flexibility of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. This approach will produce thousands of large-volume simulations at a fraction of the computational cost of traditional methods and varying sub-grid feedback assumptions while satisfying by construction a variety of observational constraints. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.