| Since its beginning some fifteen years ago, the simulation of galaxies using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) codes has become a crucial tool to understand the physics which shapes the evolution of galaxies from their origins in the early Universe to what we observe in the local Universe today. However, one piece of this physics has been relatively understudied: namely, the ionizing radiation---ultraviolet (UV) and X-ray---which is emitted by early stars, supernovae, and the accretion regions of massive black holes (BHs), and which permeates the Universe from the epoch of reionization to the present day. Therefore I perform my own SPH simulations of galaxies to study in detail the influence of this radiation.;In the first chapter of this work I find that the UV background used by most simulations to date may not fit observations constraining it at high redshift, and furthermore the details of the UV background at those redshifts, as well as the presence of an X-ray component, can strongly affect galaxy formation and evolution, specifically the gas dynamics and the amount and location of star formation.;In the second chapter I consider why, even though the dark-matter power spectrum and dark-matter simulations predict a large number of small satellite galaxies, hydrodynamic simulations have typically produced fewer satellites, consistent with observations. Performing simulations with various UV and X-ray backgrounds, I show that the number of small galaxies at the present is dependent primarily on the mean gas temperature at the epoch when low-mass systems form their stars, and this temperature is significantly determined by the ionizing radiation background.;In the third and final chapter I leave the ionizing background and turn to X-rays emitted by local active galactic nuclei (AGN)---which are massive, accreting BHs. I perform simulations with this new mode of feedback added to the standard mode (the injection of energy to adjacent gas), and find that the X-ray component enhances the effects on the host galaxy that have commonly been associated with AGN feedback---lower star-formation efficiency and less late star formation---without much changing the final BH mass from its observationally constrained value, making X-ray feedback a valuable tool to bring simulated galaxies closer to real ones. |
