N-Body Simulations of the Antennae
Chris Power
Dept. of Physics, Science Laboratories, South Road,
Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom
John Hibbard
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont
Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475, USA.
Abstract
Collisions between galaxies can be dealt with analytically only in
very specific cases. Unfortunately, the conditions that are prevalent
in the bulk of galaxy interactions rarely satisfy these idealisations
and so, when considering such situations, the researcher must make use
of N-Body simulations to model the encounters. In general, pictorial
representations of the time evolution of such encounters is
desired. In this report, I will discuss my work in this area; in
particular I will concentrate on how I developed a means to convert
observational and simulation data into a form that is readable by the
interactive 3 dimensional visualization tool, Geomview. I will
also describe my work on the matching of simulation and observational
data for the case of NGC 4038/9, the "Antennae", as well as the
motivation for such model matching and the characteristic features of
a system that are particularly suited to such fitting.
As an
interesting aside, I indulged myself and present brief discussions on
The History of Mergers and previous attempts to model the
"Antennae" in Numerical Models of NGC 4038/9.
This paper can be downloaded for prining in either postscript or PDF
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Chris Power, Last Updated: 14th Septmeber 1999
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