ITC Colloquium - Wren Suess (Berkeley) and Jens Chluba (U Manchester)

Date: 

Thursday, October 29, 2020, 11:00am to 12:00pm

Location: 

Zoom
  1. Wren Suess (Berkeley) "The growth & transformation of galaxies across cosmic time"

    Deep surveys have allowed us to chart the evolution of galaxies from billions of years ago through to the present day with unprecedented precision. We’ve learned that the properties of both star-forming and quiescent galaxies— including stellar masses, structures, star formation rates, gas content, and kinematics— change dramatically with redshift. Despite this progress, several key questions remain unsolved in our current view of galaxy evolution. We still don’t understand how galaxies grow over cosmic time, or what physical mechanisms are responsible for shutting down star formation and creating the bimodality between star-forming and quiescent galaxies. In this talk, I’ll discuss how new insights from color gradients and half-mass radii have changed our view of galaxy growth and provide insights into how galaxies quench. Finally, I’ll show that studying the molecular gas reservoirs and star-formation histories of recently-quenched galaxies can provide clues to the mechanisms responsible for quenching star formation in galaxies.  

    Jens Chluba (U Manchester) "Challenges and opportunities with CMB spectral distortions"

    Abstract: CMB spectral distortions provide a unique probe of physical processes occurring the early Universe. Our understanding of how distortion signals are created and what they can tell us about fundamental physics has greatly improved over the past years. In this talk, I will highlight some of the latest developments on the theoretical and experimental frontiers, trying to convince you that the time is ripe for opening a new window into the early Universe and particle physics with CMB spectrometers.

     

See also: Colloquium, 2020-21