Diving into Spiral Galaxy Evolution (Test Post)

My journey into astrophysics research begins with spiral galaxies and a deceptively simple question: How do galactic spirals form and evolve over time?

Welcome to my research blog! If you're interested in my work, this post will give you the basic background without delving too deep into technical details. Have you ever wondered....

Why do spiral galaxies have spirals?

Why aren't most galaxies just blobs of stars in space? What are the dynamics behind the evolution of these magnificent and complex structures? Are they permanent structures? Do they change over time?

All of these questions led to my current resesarch project.

Spiral arms in simulations of the #MilkyWay are transient, meaning they are not permanent. This leads us to believe that real spiral arms could also be transient!

How can we find out if this is true?

Compare simulations of analytical models to observations!

We want to study transient spiral structure in the Milky Way by looking for observational signatures from these spiral patterns, so we designed a simulation suite using galpy to assist us.

What is galpy?

It's the shortened version of galaxy python. Python is a powerful programming language that is very good at performing mathematical operations efficiently. The version of it that was specifically developed (thanks to the incredible Jo Bovy) to help us simulate galaxies is called galpy.