Chris Power
10th September, 1999
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
idealizations 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 visualisation 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.