Prof. Eric Emsellem
ESO
Date: 28/03/2019
Time: 11.30am
Location: Law Lecture Theatre [106], Law Department, UWA Campus
Title: Early-type galaxies: climbing to the top of the mass ladder
Abstract:
Nearby galaxies display a range of morphologies, sizes, masses, which are the results of a complex set of formation and evolution processes. In this talk, I will focus on early-type galaxies which contain about half of all the stars in our local Universe. I will review our current knowledge of how they form, what are the most important mechanisms which shaped them, and illustrate how our understanding of these objects changed over the last decade via the use of simulations and integral-field spectroscopy. I will then focus on the most massive galaxies, and report on results from numerical simulations and an observational campaign conducted with the MUSE spectrograph, which led to some interesting surprises.