Tracing Metallicity in the Scenario of High Velocity Clouds (HVCs) Colliding with Our Milky Way

Abstract

Questions of how our Milky Way evolves through the interaction with its environment have been constantly raised. One particularly interesting question is how the metallicity would change as our Milky Way goes through collision with HVCs. Because of the possibility of HVCs providing fuel for star formation in the Galactic disk, we simulate the collision between HVCs and the Galactic disk. More specifically, we trace how the Galactic metallicity changes throughout the process of HVCs colliding with our Milky Way based upon a specific scenario that HVCs are primordial gas left-overs from an ancient galaxy formation. Such mixing between metal-rich gas (disk) and metal-poor HVC can be traced by running numerical simulations with the FLASH code due to its capability of tracking down the abundance change of a specific element such as carbon at each time step of the hydrodynamic evolution. As for now, we give how this mixing depends on model parameters that we choose such as collision speed, initial metallicities, temperature and so on.