Viraj Manwadkar Honors Thesis Presentation

1:30–2:00 pm ERC 576

Viraj Manwadkar “Modeling the Chemical Abundances of Dwarf Galaxies”
Supervisor: Prof. Andrey Kravtsov

We present a flexible chemical evolution model for dwarf galaxies that builds of the star formation histories, gas inflow/outflow evolutions computed in the GRUMPY model and the Simple Stellar Population modeling capabilities of Chempy. We demonstrate the capability of this model in making detailed predictions for the stellar mass-metallicity relationship, stellar metallicity distribution functions (MDFs), and individual element abundance distributions. We show that our model predicts realistic looking MDFs ranging from luminous dwarf galaxies like Fornax to ultra-faint dwarf galaxies like Bootes I. We demonstrate that the width of the MDF increases with increasing luminosity of galaxy, and that at a fixed luminosity, more extended SFHs have smaller MDF widths. We show that stochastically sampling the IMF results in increased scatter in individual element abundance distributions and MDFs, however, the mean metallicities change negligibly. We also discuss the distribution of individual element abundances in the [X/Fe] - [Fe/H] plane for ultra-faint dwarf galaxies and show that their distributions are sensitive to SNe Ia delay time distribution and assumed nucleosynthetic yield tables.

Event Type

Seminars, Talks

May 26