Probing the formation of massive galaxies

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• Ignacio Ferreras (MSSL / University College London)
• Wednesday 07 March 2012, 14:00-15:00
• Physics Library, Physics West Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alastair Sanderson.

This talk presents recent results on studies of the properties of massive galaxies. It is split into two parts. The first one focuses on the underlying dark matter halos. Strong gravitational lensing combined with a detailed analysis of the stellar populations allows us to probe the relative contribution of baryonic and dark matter within a few effective radii. The baryon fraction profile is obtained for a sample of lensing galaxies, finding significant differences with respect to total mass. The second part of the talk will focus on compact massive galaxies at high redshift. The detection of these systems, so early in cosmic epoch, and with such small sizes, still challenge the current models of galaxy formation. By the use of spectral fitting, one can extract the star formation histories, and contrast the properties of these galaxies with the hypotheses proposed so far to explain their evolution on the size-mass plane.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Talks Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Talks Series
• Bham Talks
• Physics Library, Physics West Building
• What's on in Physics?

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