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OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
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Speaker: Guinevere Kauffmann (MPA, Garching, D)

Title: Towards an understanding of gas accretion and star formation in galaxies

Date: Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Time: 15:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni

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Abstract: Over the last decade, we have made enormous progress in understanding how the stellar masses, star formation rates and stellar populations of galaxies evolve with cosmic epoch. The physical picture that is frequently put forward is that the evolution of galaxies is controlled by a complex interplay between gas accretion and "quenching" processes, such as supernovae or AGN feedback. I will argue that if we wish to understand these processes in more detail, we need to study the gas in galaxies directly. I will describe the GALEX Arecibo SDSS Survey (GASS), an ongoing large targeted survey at Arecibo, home to the world's largest single-dish radio telescope. GASS is designed to measure the neutral hydrogen content of a representative sample of ~1000 galaxies with stellar masses greater than 1010 Msun, down to sufficiently low levels to enable us to study galaxies that may be transitioning between the blue and red sequences. I will explain the first steps we are taking towards gaining a deeper understanding how blue sequence galaxies in the local Universe maintain their observed levels of star formation.
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contact: Gabriella De Lucia (OATS)