This project is in collaboration with Professor Victor Debattista’s research group at UCLan. We use N-body + SPH simulations to investigate the formation and evolution of the Milky Way.
Initially I investigated the evolution of an isolated galaxy and the whole of clump formation during its first Gyrs (Amarante+20b). This is motivated by the fact that an early clumpy phase in the disc is able to produce the chemical and geometrical thin-thick disc dichotomy, similarly to what is observed in the Milky Way (Clarke+2019, Beraldo e Silva+2020). Moreover, clumps are also observed in high redshift galaxies, z > 1, with relatively high frequency. With this motivation, I investigated the chemo-kinematics properties of the same model studied in Clarke+2019. We were able to demonstrate that the formation of a low angular momentum, $v_{\phi}<100$ km/s, metal-rich, -0.7 < [Fe/H] < -0.2, population occurs in the first Gyrs during the galaxy’s clumpy episode. This is in contrast with the proposed formation mechanism via a merger (Di Matteo+2019, Belokurov+20).
Currently, I am investigating the whole of mergers and clumps in the structure and evolution of disc-like galaxies. Soon more information about it!