Home Movies
Movies
Cancel

Movies

Dusty Cloud-Wind Simulations

To test the ability of cool clouds of gas to shield dust from sputtering in galactic winds, I ran a suite of dusty cloud-wind tunnel simulations (described in Richie et al. 2024). We analyzed the efficiency of sputtering in various regimes of cloud evolution by varying cloud size, wind temperature, and wind velocity. In this paper, we focus on three case studies: destroyed, survived, and disrupted clouds. Clouds that are destroyed in outflows are quickly fragmented and mixed into the hot phase before they can reach the CGM, resulting in total loss of cool-phase shielding for dust. Survived clouds are long-lived, with a smooth and continuous distribution of cool gas that is very efficient at shielding dust from the hot and mixed gas phases. Disrupted clouds can survive to populate the CGM with cool gas and dust but have an overall more fragmented morphology, which results in increased hot and mixed-phase exposure for dust.

Destroyed Cloud

Survived Cloud

Disrupted Cloud