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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)