Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Colloquium

Monday, September 30, 2013 at 4:00 PM

JILA Auditorium

Jenny Greene, Princeton University

"To Build an Elliptical Galaxy"

Abstract:

I discuss two essential aspects of elliptical galaxy formation: how they get their stars, and how they lose their gas. For the former, I use integral-field observations of local massive galaxies to study the stellar populations and kinematics of stars at large radius, to understand the origin of the size growth of elliptical galaxies. Then I focus on black hole feedback as a means of clearing gas from massive galaxies. I show that luminous obscured quasars have ubiquitous, round ionized outflows with very high gas dispersions of nearly 1000 km/s out to 20 kpc. Finally, if time permits I will combine these two themes and present our recent search for sub-pc supermassive black hole binaries.

 

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