Pascal Steger

I N S T I T U T E O F A S T R O N O M Y
H O E N G G E R B E R G C A M P U S

Picture of myself About us

Extragalactic Astrophysics &
Observational Cosmology Group

Pascal S.P. Steger


ETH Zurich Institute of Astronomy, HIT J13.1 CH-8093 Zurich Switzerland Personal webpage	Phone: +41 (0) 44 633 40 25 Fax: +41 (0) 44 633 12 38 eMail: psteger@phys.ethz.ch

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Curriculum Vitae

Education
	2005 - 2008	BSc studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
	2010 -	MSc studies, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Employment
	2010 -	Teaching Assistant, ETH Zurich Supervisor: Prof. Dr. C.M. Carollo

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Research Interests

I am interested in extragalactic structures and their interplay with galaxy formation.

Current Research

My bachelor research is concentrating on correlations between dark matter, gas and stars in galaxy clusters, based on hydrodynamical simulations. I found

mean disalignments of angular momentum between gas and dark matter of 59^o and 76^o for host and field halos, respectively. Field galaxies show a lack of small alignment angles;

a correlation between the biggest eigenvalue t₁ of the tidal field and total angular momentum that is similar, but less distinct than between t₁ and the main inertia axis;

the halo spin parameter distribution of gas to be roughly an order of magnitude higher than the one of dark matter and stars.

For my Bachelor thesis I used cosmological simulations of three individual galaxy clusters embedded in a cosmological box. The simulations were performed using the tree-SPH+N-body code GADGET-2 and include subgrid models for cooling, star formation and stellar feedback. Three galaxy clusters were resimulated at 45 times higher resolution giving a mass resolution of 1.03E7M_Sun/h for the dark matter particles, and comparable resolution for gas and star particles. The simulations were started at z=100 and evolved until z=0, where the analysis is performed.

Not for amateurs: AMATEUR

Main tool to extract the properties from the raw simulation output is a set of programs dubbed "AMATEUR", which enables reading and transformation of the datasets, includes AHF's halo finder, runs extractions of various properties of the dark matter, gas and stellar component of each halo, determines the halo/subhalo tree and calculates the tidal field at a desired smoothing scale.

Publications

P.S.P. Steger, O. Hahn, C.M. Carollo, C. Porciani, G. Tormen,
Correlations between gas, star and dark matter components of halos in a SPH simulation , in preparation