Astronomy & Astrophysics Seminar: MAD Science: The growth and death of galaxies

Abstract:

I will show results on how stellar mass builds up with time inside galaxies, and present the perspective that emerges, which unifies three major open questions in galaxy evolution, namely: (1) How do massive galaxies grow their dense bulges? (2) How do they quench their star formation activity? (3) What causes the observed growth with time of the average size of the quenched galaxy population? I will conclude with a look ahead on the MUSE Atlas of Disks (MAD), a just-started large program with the new MUSE IFU spectrograph on the ESO VLT. MAD anatomizes how gas and stars interact within galaxies on the tens-to-hundreds pc scales over which star formation and stellar feedback take place, providing fundamental constraints on the physical state that characterises the active phase of galactic life on the star-forming Main Sequence.

Seminar Organizer: Prof. Amiel Sternberg