Term of Award

Spring 2025

Degree Name

Master of Science, Applied Physical Science

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Committee Chair

Clayton Heller

Committee Member 1

Dragos Amarie

Committee Member 2

Jorge Villa-Vargas

Abstract

In this study we examine the influence of dark matter halo triaxiality on the evolution of galactic disks. We do this by running a series of collisionless N-body models. In a first set of models we place the galactic disk within an oblate halo at various orientations and examine the resulting evolution. In our second set we construct fully self-consistent models of a stellar disk embedded within a spherical halo, with an impacting external dark matter dwarf galaxy. After evolving the simulations for a Hubble time, we examine the disk orientation and warping along with other quantities such as bar strength. We found that disks are robust and uniformly reorient themselves with respect to the halo short axis with little warping. However, the disk angular momentum does not always fully align resulting in a precession. The dependence on dwarf density is as expected from dynamical friction with the denser dwarf’s material being captured deeper within the halo resulting in a larger affect on the potential. Bars are destroyed, weakened, or strengthened depending upon impact parameters.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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