Numerical Simulations of Galaxy Formation

The current status of numerical simulations of galaxy formation is reviewed. After a short description of the main numerical simulation techniques, three sample applications illustrate how numerical simulations have provided deeper insight in the galaxy formation process and how they have illuminated success and failure of the hierarchical galaxy formation paradigm: N-body simulations demonstrate that the density profiles of dark matter halos that form in hierarchical clustering scenarios follow a characteristic law. A comparison with the kinematics of disk galaxies however unravels that these density profiles are too concentrated. Hydrodynamical simulation show that the highly irregular velocity field of merging subclumps at redshift $z\approx 3$ can easily account for the observed asymmetry in the absorption profiles of low ionization species in damped \Lya absorption systems. The built-up of galaxies due to mergers is however also cause for one of the major inconsistencies of hierarchical structure formation models, the failure to reproduce the sizes of the present day disk galaxies due to excessive transport of angular momentum from the baryonic to the dark matter component. Hydrodynamical simulations that include star formation show that scaling laws like the Tully-Fisher relation can readily be reproduced in hierarchical scenarios, however the high concentration of dark matter halos results in a zero-point of the simulated Tully-Fisher relation that is incompatible wi th observations. 22 pages, 7 figures included, invited review presented at the conference "Toward a New Millennium in Galaxy Morphology", Johannesburg, South Africa, September 13-19, 1999