Скачать или смотреть Charting the Chemistry of Galaxies across Cosmic Time: JWST and Beyond with Allison Strom

The chemistry of gas and stars in galaxies connects many seemingly disparate areas of astrophysics, from planet formation and stellar evolution to the enrichment and physical state of the circumgalactic and intergalactic media. Because heavy elements are the end product of converting gas to stars, measuring the abundance and distribution of different elements in and around galaxies is key to determining how galaxies grow and change over time. Astronomers have been studying the chemistry of galaxies outside the Milky Way for well over 50 years, but only in the last decade have detailed studies of galaxies beyond the nearby universe been possible. I will highlight recent advances in our understanding of galaxy enrichment during the first few Gyr of cosmic history, enabled by some of the most powerful near-infrared spectrographs on the ground and aboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which just concluded the first year of its scientific mission. These new observations are revealing a more nuanced picture of early galaxies than ever before and allow us to place them in the context of what we know about the overall galaxy population and their present-day descendants.

Allison Strom is an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern University and a core faculty member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She received a PhD in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2017 and was a Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellow before joining Northwestern in 2022. The principal goal of her research is to understand the physical processes that cause different galaxies to follow different evolutionary paths, which is a longstanding open question in modern astronomy. She uses some of the largest telescopes on the ground and in space to answer this question by studying the physical and chemical properties of "teenage" galaxies that were forming in the early universe.

This colloquium was recorded on Thursday, August 31, 2023 at the Aspen Center for Physics.