Chemodynamical Simulations of Elliptical Galaxies

¹ University of Central Lancashire, Centre for Astrophysics, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK
² Carnegie Observatories, Pasadena, USA

Corresponding authors: bkgibson@uclan.ac.uk ; psanchez-blazquez@uclan.ac.uk ; scourty@uclan.ac.uk ; dkawata@ociw.edu

Abstract

We review recent developments in the field of chemodynamical simulations of elliptical galaxies, highlighting (in an admittedly biased fashion) the work conducted with our cosmological N-body/SPH code GCD+. We have demonstrated previously the recovery of several primary integrated early-type system scaling relations (e.g. colour- magnitude relation, L_X − T_X − [Fe/H]_X) when employing a phenomenological AGN heating scheme in conjunction with a self-consistent treatment of star formation, supernovae feedback, radiative cooling, chemical enrichment, and stellar/X-ray population synthesis. Here we emphasise characteristics derived from the full spatial information contained within the simulated dataset, including stellar and coronal morphologies, metallicity distribution functions, and abundance gradients.