Thursday, February 01, 2024 at 3:30 pm

JILA auditorium

Jorge Moreno, Pomona College

"Galaxies in extreme environments"

Abstract:

Galaxies are a lot like people. If you pay attention to someone’s accent, mannerism, music taste, and cuisine preference — you can infer something about their culture, their heritage, their ancestry. On the same vein, by inspecting a galaxy’s morphology, kinematics and chemical composition — one can infer information about its assembly history, its interaction history. The first part of this talk will focus on extreme galactic collisions, where a small satellite crashes onto the baryonic body of a massive neighbor and survives. It turns out that this mechanism explains the existence of dark matter deficient galaxies (Moreno et al., Nature Astronomy, 6, 496). I will devote the second part of this talk to showcasing my extensive track record in simulating the role of environment in galaxy evolution. I will close this talk with CAFESITO (CosmologicAl FiEld SImulaTiOns), a novel suite of state-of-the-art cosmological simulations. The advent of JWST has been instrumental to detect the most massive galaxies at cosmic dawn, and characterize their structure at cosmic noon. However, high-redshift galaxies in the low-mass end of the spectrum are not accessible to JWST, and we will not be able to study them directly in the foreseeable future. Our only chance is to characterize their descendants: low-mass galaxies in extremely low density environments. These galaxies are expected to have had the most quiet assembly histories, and be only affected by reionization. For these reasons, aggressive simulation campaigns like CAFESITO are paramount. These simulations will lay the ground for the upcoming era of spectroscopic observations with 30-m class ground telescopes, under the US Extremely Large Telescope Program.

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