Sebastian Trujillo
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| Research/Teaching Assistant |
| Entered: | 2007 |
| Office: | 111 Astronomy |
| Phone: | (575)646-4813 |
| Fax: | (575)646-1602 |
| |
| E-mail: | st |
| (append "@nmsu.edu") |
| |
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| M.S. | City University of New York, | 2007 |
| B.S. | SUNY Stony Brook, | 2004 |
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Research
I began my graduate studies at NMSU in Fall 2007, working with Dr. Anatoly Klypin
in the extragalactic research group on modeling the formation and evolution of
galaxies. My primary interest is in the field of cosmology, though I am also
quite fascinated by topics as diverse as extrasolar planets, gamma ray bursts,
and supermassive black holes.
In the Spring of 2008 I began working on a new research project with Dr. Klypin and Dr. Holtzman. The
project is aimed at constraining cosmological models by studying a large homogeneous sample of galaxies
in the nearby Virgo cluster. This will be done using the first direct determination of the galaxy circular
velocity function using a sample galaxies comprising the very low mass end of the galaxy mass function.
This fall I will publish the results of a project on the spatial and dynamical properties of substructure
obtained from high resolution cosmological N-body simulations. In this work Dr. Klypin and I focused on the halo circular
velocity distribution, number density profiles and angular momentum correlations as a function of halo size
and spatial distribution. In particular,
smaller simulation volumes were used to disentangle the effects of tidal stripping and numerical resolution on
the low mass end of the halo distribution. As a way to obtain some insight into the complex process of galaxy
formation, we are developing a simple model for populating our simulated dark matter halos with galaxies.
This scheme may help link the observed
relationship between luminosity and total mass distribution (e.g. Tully-Fisher, Faber-Jackson, etc.) to the
formation of structure in the LambdaCDM cosmology. This sample of modeled galaxies is also very useful for
comparing with several observational probes of the mass distribution in the universe. Next year we hope to
continue this work with a follow-up that will incorporate the merging histories of the dark matter haloes and the
redshift evolution of the halo distribution and the associated galaxies.
In 2010, I will begin work on contructing a self-consistent model of the Milky Way using
hydrodynamical simulations. Incorporating the observed structure of the galaxy, this model will attempt to
produce a halo gas distribution that incorporates inflow and outflow and is stable enough to reproduce the
star formation history and distribution observed in the disk.
An image from a Utah Skies Report
showing the nearby Virgo cluster of galaxies.
