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Project Overview

In this project the goal was to implement a very simplified model of galaxy collisions, motivated by work due to Alar and Juri Toomre in the early 1970’s. This model is grossly inadequate for the detailed simulation of galaxy interactions but nevertheless capable of reproducing some basic morphological features that are observed in actual galactic collisions. The model that will be studied in this project will be the Toomre Model. In the Toomre model, an isolated galaxy is modeled as a central particle (core particle) that has some gravitating mass, mc. Orbiting this core is some number, ns, of stars each with circular orbits of varying radii. The stars have vanishing gravitating mass which means they experience an acceleration due to the core’s gravitational influence, but do not contribute to the gravitational field themselves. Therefore, the core acts on each of the stars, but the stars do not exert gravitational forces on either the core or the other stars.

To model a two galaxy collision we consider two cores (masses mc1 and mc2) surrounded by ns1 and ns2 particles. The galaxies start with initial positions that ensure that the interaction of core 1 with the stars from galaxy 2 and vice versa is negligible. The galaxies will approach and interact in some fashion with one another. All of the stars feel the gravitational influence of both cores, and each core feels the gravitational influence of the other core. Therefore, any given particle will experience a gravitational force from either one or two core particles. This results in interesting galaxy collisions heavely dependent on initial conditions.

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