Nastasha Wijers is a CIERA postdoctoral fellow working in Claude-André Faucher-Giguère’s group. She is interested in galaxy formation and the circumgalactic medium. In particular, she wants to know how the circumgalactic medium and the flows of baryons between the intergalactic medium, the circumgalactic medium, and the galaxy shape and are shaped by the galaxy and the circumgalactic gas. A major limiting factor in our current knowledge of the circumgalactic medium is that the warm/hot circumgalactic gas is difficult to observe, especially around galaxies like our Milky Way. She is focused on finding ways to find this gas, learning how what we find is connected to the properties of the circumgalactic medium (e.g., its mass, temperatures, and composition), and what that tells us about the physical processes shaping this gas. She studies this using the FIRE simulations. These are simulations of galaxies and their circumgalactic medium, and many processes that we think are important in galaxy formation. She will examine the processes taking place in individual simulations, and how those differ between simulations with different models for physical processes, in order to help uncover which processes shape the circumgalactic medium, and what their observable consequences are.
