OBSERVING SIMULATIONS: MOLECULAR CLOUDS AND THEIR JOURNEY IN THE GALAXY

In order to have a global picture of the cycle of matter in galaxies, we need to understand the interplay of large-scale galactic phenomena with the formation of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and, ultimately, their subsequent star formation (SF). In this work, we study the population of GMCs within a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulation of a spiral galaxy, and investigate the link between the GMC properties and position with respect to spiral arms, both directly from the simulation (with the 3D densities of H2 and CO) and from an observer's perspective (with CO emission in PPV space).