Title: Dynamics of extragalactic galaxies, a theoretical perspective: star-forming galaxies and Milky Way and Andromeda analogs with the TNG50 simulation

Abstract: The talk will focus on the evolution across cosmic epochs of the stellar and gaseous structures and kinematics of star-forming galaxies. In particular, I will use the IllustrisTNG cosmological galaxy simulations (www.tng-project.org), and particularly its highest-resolution realization TNG50, to gain insights into the connection between stellar and warm-gas kinematics in galaxies and between kinematics and structural morphologies. I will contrast the simulation results on the degree of rotational support in star-forming galaxies across time to analytical models of marginally stable disks. I will also showcase the possible issues that arise when observations from individual objects in the sky are compared to median results from models obtained by averaging across galaxy populations or when galaxy populations at fixed stellar mass are compared across cosmic epochs to infer evolutionary pathways. Finally, I will give a glimpse into the global properties, stellar disk structure and dark matter content that naturally emerge in modern cosmological simulations when selecting for Milky Way and Andromeda analogs.

Bio: Annalisa Pillepich is an astrophysicist who works with supercomputer simulations of large parts of virtual universes to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies. She is a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg. Before that, she obtained her Bachelor and Master in Physics at the Universita' di Pisa, to then complete her PhD at the ETH in Zurich in 2010 with a thesis on "Constraining Primordial Non-Gaussianity from the Large Scale Structure of the Universe" under the supervisions of Cristiano Porciani. She worked as a postdoc at the University of California in Santa Cruz and at Harvard University in the groups of Piero Madau and Lars Hernquist, respectively, before reaching Germany in 2016.