Simulating the formation and evolution of galaxies with EvoL,the Padova N-body Tree-SPH Code

摘要

The importance of numerical simulations in astrophysics is con-stantly growing, because of the complexity, the multi-scaling properties and thenon-linearity of many physical phenomena. In particular, cosmological and galaxy-sized simulations of structure formation have cast light on different aspects, givinganswers to many questions, but raising a number of new issues to be investigated.Over the last decade, great effort has been devoted in Padova to develop a toolexplicitly designed to study the problem of galaxy formation and evolution, withparticular attention to the early-type ones. To this aim, many simulations havebeen run on CINECA supercomputers (see publications list below). The next stepis the new release of EvoL, a Fortran N-body code capable to follow in great detailmany different aspects of stellar, interstellar and cosmological physics. In particu-lar, special care has been paid to the properties of stars and their interplay withthe surrounding interstellar medium (ISM), as well as to the multiphase nature ofthe ISM, to the setting of the initial and boundary conditions, and to the correctdescription of gas physics via modern formulations of the classical Smoothed Par-ticle Hydrodynamics algorithms. Moreover, a powerful tool to compare numericalpredictions with observables has been developed, self-consistently closing the wholepackage. A library of new simulations, run with EvoL on CINECA supercomputers,is to be built in the next years, while new physics, including magnetic properties ofmatter and more exotic energy feedback effects, is to be added.