Colloq Abstract - Hess
Feb 19
12:00Noon Mountain
Kelley Hess (Groningen)
Environmentally driven galaxy evolution and the coming radio revolution
Abstract
The environment in which a galaxy lives plays a key role in driving its evolution. Neutral atomic hydrogen (HI), traced by the radio 21 cm line, is the raw fuel for star formation and the most tenuously bound component of galaxies. It is therefore a critical tracer of galaxy evolution both as a measure of future star formation potential and for revealing the interaction history of a galaxy with its environment. My research has combined knowledge of the HI with multi-wavelength data and kinematic tests to show where gas processing occurs in different environments. However, our detailed understanding of the gas processing which drives galaxy evolution has been limited by the resolution, redshift coverage, and lack of molecular gas data for existing HI surveys. I will present a vision of the future which will be achieved by combining APERTIF, a survey which is generating the largest collection of resolved HI galaxies in the northern hemisphere across a broad range of environments, with WEAVE-Apertif, its dedicated optical IFU follow up, VLASS, and ultimately the ngVLA. Together these surveys will provide an unmatched view of the stellar, ionized, neutral, and molecular gas properties of nearby galaxies to disentangle the relative importance of different physical mechanisms which drive galaxy evolution and set the benchmark for pushing our detailed understanding of galaxy evolution to higher redshift.
