Speaker: Fernando Buitrago (Universidad de Valladolid)Title: Why do galaxy sizes matter?
Abstract: During the last decades, galaxy sizes have been a very active research topic in Astrophysics given the fact that they are one of the few direct observables from objects in the distant Universe. In this seminar, I will review the different approaches that were traditionally taken, showing what we have learned about how our Universe works over time. However, galaxies are fuzzy objects, and as such it is very hard to assign sizes to them. One would naively think that by observing for larger integration times and/or by using better telescopes these objects will grow bigger and bigger. I will prove you wrong by describing a novel physically-motivated size proxy (the galaxy edges or galaxy truncations) that my team GEELSBE (Galactic Edges and Euclid in the Low Surface Brightness Era) at the University of Valladolid is studying. We have utilized the deepest pointings of the Hubble Space Telescope (while now using the James Webb Space Telescope and Machine Learning algorithms) to obtain the evolution of this parameter last 8 Gyr promising to give us first hand information not only about the baryonic mass assembly but also the dark matter halo evolution.
Date and time: Wednesday, June 05, (13:00)
Room: Aula V, Edificio Trilingüe, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Salamanca
