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Black Hole

Lensing of space time around a black hole. At Oxford we study black holes observationally and theoretically on all size and time scales - it is some of our core work.

Credit: ALAIN RIAZUELO, IAP/UPMC/CNRS. CLICK HERE TO VIEW MORE IMAGES.

Dr Harley Katz

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Sub department

  • Astrophysics
harley.katz@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 273348
Denys Wilkinson Building, room 532D
  • About
  • Publications

MgII in the JWST era: a probe of Lyman continuum escape?

(2022)

Authors:

Harley Katz, Thibault Garel, Joakim Rosdahl, Valentin Mauerhofer, Taysun Kimm, Jérémy Blaizot, Léo Michel-Dansac, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz, Martin Haehnelt

Towards convergence of turbulent dynamo amplification in cosmological simulations of galaxies

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 513:3 (2022) 3326-3344

Authors:

Sergio Martin-Alvarez, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz, Debora Sijacki, Mark LA Richardson, Harley Katz

Abstract:

Our understanding of the process through which magnetic fields reached their observed strengths in present-day galaxies remains incomplete. One of the advocated solutions is a turbulent dynamo mechanism that rapidly amplifies weak magnetic field seeds to the order of ∼μG. However, simulating the turbulent dynamo is a very challenging computational task due to the demanding span of spatial scales and the complexity of the required numerical methods. In particular, turbulent velocity and magnetic fields are extremely sensitive to the spatial discretization of simulated domains. To explore how refinement schemes affect galactic turbulence and amplification of magnetic fields in cosmological simulations, we compare two refinement strategies. A traditional quasi-Lagrangian adaptive mesh refinement approach focusing spatial resolution on dense regions, and a new refinement method that resolves the entire galaxy with a high resolution quasi-uniform grid. Our new refinement strategy yields much faster magnetic energy amplification than the quasi-Lagrangian method, which is also significantly greater than the adiabatic compressional estimate indicating that the extra amplification is produced through stretching of magnetic field lines. Furthermore, with our new refinement the magnetic energy growth factor scales with resolution following ∝Δx−1/2max⁠, in much better agreement with small-scale turbulent box simulations. Finally, we find evidence suggesting most magnetic amplification in our simulated galaxies occurs in the warm phase of their interstellar medium, which has a better developed turbulent field with our new refinement strategy.

Predicting Lyman-continuum emission of galaxies using their physical and Lyman-alpha emission properties

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences 663 (2022) A66-A66

Authors:

Moupiya Maji, Anne Verhamme, Joakim Rosdahl, Thibault Garel, Jérémy Blaizot, Valentin Mauerhofer, Marta Pittavino, Maria-Pia Victoria Feser, Mathieu Chuniaud, Taysun Kimm, Harley Katz, Martin Haehnelt

Abstract:

The primary difficulty in understanding the sources and processes that powered cosmic reionization is that it is not possible to directly probe the ionizing Lyman Continuum (LyC) radiation at that epoch as those photons have been absorbed by the intervening neutral hydrogen in the IGM on their way to us. It is therefore imperative to build a model to accurately predict LyC emission using other properties of galaxies in the reionization era. In recent years, studies have shown that the LyC emission from galaxies may be correlated to their Lya emission. Here, we study this correlation by analyzing thousands of galaxies at high-z in the SPHINX cosmological simulation. We post-process these galaxies with the Lya radiative transfer code RASCAS and analyze the Lya - LyC connection. We find that the Lya and LyC luminosities are strongly correlated with each other, although with dispersion. There is a positive correlation between Lya and LyC escape fractions in the brightest Lya emitters (>$10^{41}$ erg/s), similar to the recent observational studies. However, when we also include fainter Lya emitters (LAEs), the correlation disappears, which suggests that the observed relationship may be driven by selection effects. We also find that bright LAEs are dominant contributors to reionization ($> 10^{40}$ erg/s galaxies contribute $> 90\%$ of LyC emission). Finally, we build predictive models using multivariate linear regression where we use the physical and the Lya properties of simulated galaxies to predict their intrinsic and escaping LyC luminosities with a high degree of accuracy. We find that the most important galaxy properties to predict the escaping LyC luminosity of a galaxy are its escaping Lya luminosity, gas mass, gas metallicity, and SFR. These models can be very useful to predict LyC emissions from galaxies and can help us identify the sources of reionization.Comment: Accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) Journal. 27 pages, 21 Figure

Simulating jellyfish galaxies: a case study for a gas-rich dwarf galaxy

The Astrophysical Journal IOP Publishing 928:2 (2022) 144

Authors:

Jaehyun Lee, Taysun Kimm, Jeremy Blaizot, Harley Katz, Wonki Lee, Yun-Kyeong Sheen, Julien Devriendt, Adrianne Slyz

Abstract:

We investigate the formation of jellyfish galaxies using radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of gas-rich dwarf galaxies with a multiphase interstellar medium (ISM). We find that the ram-pressure-stripped (RPS) ISM is the dominant source of molecular clumps in the near wake within 10 kpc from the galactic plane, while in situ formation is the major channel for dense gas in the distant tail of the gas-rich galaxy. Only 20% of the molecular clumps in the near wake originate from the intracluster medium (ICM); however, the fraction reaches 50% in the clumps located at 80 kpc from the galactic center since the cooling time of the RPS gas tends to be short owing to the ISM–ICM mixing (≲10 Myr). The tail region exhibits a star formation rate of 0.001–0.01 M⊙ yr−1, and most of the tail stars are born in the stripped wake within 10 kpc from the galactic plane. These stars induce bright Hα blobs in the tail, while Hα tails fainter than 6 × 1038 erg s−1 kpc−2 are mostly formed via collisional radiation and heating due to mixing. We also find that the stripped tails have intermediate X-ray-to-Hα surface brightness ratios (1.5 ≲ FX/FHα ≲ 20), compared to the ISM (≲1.5) or pure ICM (≫20). Our results suggest that jellyfish features emerge when the ISM from gas-rich galaxies is stripped by strong ram pressure, mixes with the ICM, and enhances the cooling in the tail.

RAMSES-RTZ: non-equilibrium metal chemistry and cooling coupled to on-the-fly radiation hydrodynamics

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 512:1 (2022) 348-365

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