Gaseous Dynamical Friction: a Numerical Study of Extended Perturbers

Understand

The process of momentum and energy transfer between a massive body and a background medium it is moving through is known as dynamical friction (DF).

• It is key to our understanding of many astrophysical systems.
• We present a series of high-resolution simulations of gaseous DF using Lagrangian meshless finite mass hydrodynamics solver, the moving-mesh MUSCL scheme, and the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) solver.
• We use a set of simulations of massive bodies, modelled as Plummer spheres, moving with Mach $0.2 \leq \mathcal{M} \leq 3$.