Ethan Taylor
About
Biography
My project looks at star clusters within the faintest dwarf galaxies, especially our EDGE simulation suite, and tries to connect this to dark matter. These star clusters form naturally within our EDGE simulations and my job is to; track them down, see how they form, what their environments are like when they do, and what happens to them afterwards. This will allow me to both look deeper into star cluster formation, as well as make some further comments about the true nature of dark matter itself.
Dwarf galaxies are sensitive to feedback processes as well as their environments so simulating galaxies like this, where we can see their life evolve before our eyes, allows us to see what their pasts were like as well as what they're like today. This finally allows us to link observational data to simulational data.
Publications
Purely collisionless Dark Matter Only (DMO) structure formation simulations predict that Dark Matter (DM) haloes are typically prolate in their centres and spheroidal towards their outskirts. The addition of gas cooling transforms the central DM shape to be rounder and more oblate. It is not clear, however, whether such shape transformations occur in `ultra-faint' dwarfs, which have extremely low baryon fractions. We present the first study of the shape and velocity anisotropy of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies that have gas mass fractions of $f_{\rm gas}(r