Speaker
Description
Galaxies orbiting in galaxy clusters and approaching such a cluster’s center experience strong ram pressure that can remove significant fractions of the ISM- and CGM-gas of these galaxies, giving rise to so-called jellyfish galaxies with extended tails of stripped material. The gas removal due to ram pressure stripping (RPS) is a key ingredient for transforming star forming spirals into quenched ellipticals, and RPS is therefore an important aspect for understanding galaxy evolution in cluster environments. In addition, the magnetized, multiphase, clumpy, and often star forming tails of these jellyfish galaxies are themselves unique laboratories for astrophysics. An efficient way of numerically modelling RPS is running windtunnel simulations, exposing a simulated galaxy in its rest frame to a wind that simulates the conditions in the intracluster medium (ICM) along the galaxy’s orbit. These winds, however, are often generated based on highly idealized assumptions. We present windtunnel simulations of RPS that use winds generated from realistic galaxy orbits in cosmological zoom-in simulations, modelling RPS under realistic ICM conditions. We show how different orbits can alter RPS and the tails of jellyfish galaxies.
