Friday, April 25, 2025 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Sanskriti Das , Stanford University

"Where the Hot Universe Meets the Energetic Universe"

Abstract:

The hot circumgalactic medium (CGM), a reservoir of missing baryons, metals, and energy, plays a key role in our understanding of galaxy evolution. However, extraordinary observational challenges make the hot CGM one of the least understood components of galaxies. Studying the hot CGM was not the objective of the current X-ray or mm facilities during the design phase. However, as an excellent byproduct, observing the hot CGM has emerged as a promising field over the last two decades, coming to the forefront of priority science goals for the current and upcoming decades.

I will discuss three snippets of our recent efforts to detect and characterize the hot CGM: 1) X-raying the Milky Way: Investigating thermal and chemical anomalies; 2) Is CGM detectable with existing missions? Conducting deep searches in individual external galaxies using X-ray, and 3) Test for self-similarity: stacking thousands of galaxies in mm (Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect). I will highlight how our findings provide insights into the impact of galactic feedback on the hot CGM, establish our confidence in leveraging current telescopes to inform theoretical simulations, and set a benchmark for designing experiments with next-generation X-ray and mm facilities.

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