Bridging Gaseous Medium Across Scales and Phases
Avery Kim
Graduate Student
Columbia University
The gaseous medium within and surrounding galaxies plays a pivotal role in astrophysical processes across vast spatial and temporal scales. In this presentation, I will outline my efforts to bridge this vast range of scales and elucidate the underlying physics governing galaxy formation using an observational and data-driven approach. In the first half of the talk, I will introduce a novel statistical technique designed to quantify associations between HI emission and UV absorbers near the MS and nearby galaxies. With a concept of statistical distance, our approach provides important insights in the ionization states and spatial distributions of gas in these regions. I will discuss the potential applications of this technique for unraveling the interactions and structures within any complex gaseous systems of galaxies. For the second part of the talk, I will either discuss techniques for extracting structures in the Milky Way and Magellanic systems, including the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), and relate these structures to physical features such as kinematics, phase, and magnetic field or introduce a novel inference technique which identifies representative physics associated with observational galaxy properties in the Santa Cruz Semi-analytical model. Taken together, these efforts aim to provide a more comprehensive view on how we interpret observation and simulation data.