Wine and Cheese Spring 2025

This page records the schedule, titles and abstracts of the JHU/STScI CAS Astrophysics Wine & Cheese Series in Spring 2025.

Wine and Cheese sessions with one speaker will have a 50 minute talk with 10 minutes for questions. Sessions with two speakers will have two 25 minute talks, each with 5 minutes for questions.

03 February

Cameron Trapp (JHU)

Torques and Radial Flows of Gas in Simulated Milky-Way Mass Galaxies
Observations indicate that a continuous gas supply is needed to maintain observed star formation rates in large, disky galaxies. To fuel star formation, gas must reach the inner regions of such galaxies. Despite its crucial importance for galaxy evolution, how and where gas joins galaxies is poorly constrained observationally and rarely explored in fully cosmological simulations. I will discuss the results of our initial study investigating gas accretion and transport in the FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations for 4 Milky Way mass galaxies. We generally found that gas joins just interior to the disk edge before radially transporting through the disk at average speeds of 1-5 km/s. This corresponds to radial mass fluxes of a few solar masses per year, comparable to the galaxies’ star formation rates. I will also discuss more recent work focused on understanding the angular momentum transfer required for these gas flows, including torques arising from various gravitational and magnetohydrodynamical forces. Finally, I will give a quick introduction to the work I will be doing as a new postdoc here at JHU, working with the FOGGIE simulations.