I discuss recent work in which we construct models of poststarburst galaxies by combining fully three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations of galaxy mergers with radiative transfer calculations of dust attenuation. The poststarburst signatures can occur shortly after a bright starburst phase in gas-rich mergers, and thus offer a unique opportunity to study the formation of bulges and the effects of feedback. Several additional applications of spatially-resolved spectroscopic models of interacting galaxies include multi-wavelength studies of AGN/starburst diagnostics, mock integral field unit data to interpret the evolution of ULIRGs, and the ‘Green Valley’.

Optical spectra of simulated major gas-rich galaxy mergers can be found at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~gsnyder

In the numerical simulations of evolution of star clusters, binary-single star interactions frequently take place. Since the direct integration of them is time consuming, distant interactions between binaries and field stars are often integrated by using some approximations. Traditionally the effect of the error caused by the approximated treatment is regarded as small enough to be ignored. However, if we have a binary-dominated core, the energy drift is large. In this study, we perform numerical experiments to evaluate the effect of neglecting the weak perturbation from distant single particles. We developed an N-body integrator which can manipulate multiple precision floating point numbers.