G. Carraro et al., GALAXY FORMATION AND EVOLUTION - I - THE PADUA TREE-SPH CODE (PD-SPH), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 297(4), 1998, pp. 1021-1040
In this paper we report on PD-SPH, the new TREE-SPH code developed in
Padua. The main features of the code are described and the results of
a new and independent series of 1D and 3D tests are shown. The paper i
s mainly dedicated to the presentation of the code and to the critical
discussion of its performance. In particular, great attention is devo
ted to the convergency analysis. The code is highly adaptive in space
and time by means of individual smoothing lengths and individual time-
steps. At present it contains both dark and baryonic matter, this latt
er in the form of gas and stars, cooling, thermal conduction, star for
mation, feedback from Type I and II supernovae, stellar winds, and ult
raviolet flux from massive stars, and finally chemical enrichment. New
cooling rates that depend on the metal abundance of the interstellar
medium are employed, and the differences with respect to the standard
ones are outlined. Finally, we show the simulation of the dynamical an
d chemical evolution of a disc-like galaxy with and without feedback.
The code is suitably designed to study in a global fashion the problem
of formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies, and in particular
to feed a spectrophotometric code from which the integrated spectra, m
agnitudes and colours (together with their spatial gradients) can be d
erived.