The three-dimensional TREE N-Body/SPH simulation code used included dark matter and gas dynamics, radiative cooling, star formation, supernova feedback, and metal enrichment. The initial condition was a slowly rotating, top-hat over-dense sphere on which the perturbations expected in a cold dark matter (CDM) universe were superposed. By means of a stellar-population synthesis, we calculated the surface-brightness profile, the metallicity distribution, and the photometric properties of the end-product, and found that these properties quantitatively agree with the observed properties of bright elliptical galaxies.
A snap shot from the galaxy formation movie.
Gas clouds are represented by blue dots. Stellar particles are
color-coded according to their age, with cyan dots representing
stars younger than 0.1 Gyr, yellow dots stars younger than 0.5 Gyr,
and red dots other old stars.
| Smoothed Gas version [ mpg file (170 KB)] | On l-b plane [ mpg file (560 KB)] |
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