Astro-Webinar-2022-02-08

Astrophysics Webinar

New Results on Galaxy Mergers: Galaxy Formation, Cosmology, and Gravitational Waves

Speaker: Christopher J. Conselice (University of Manchester, UK)

तिथि और समय

अमूर्त

I will present new results on observed galaxy mergers using a few different surveys and projects.  The first is a galaxy pair methodology within the REFINE survey - an analysis of the 3 deepest large near-infrared extragalactic fields.  I will discuss the role of both major and minor mergers in the formation of galaxies up to z~6.  I will then discuss new results using machine learning on the Illustris cosmological simulation to determine the merger history with deep learning by training a machine on the simulation and then applying the supervised learning to resolved imaging data from the Hubble Space Telescope. I will show that these two methods of finding mergers are consistent and provides further evidence for the existence of dark matter in a new way.  I will also discuss how these results provide unique information about the origin of gravitational waves discovered by LIGO/VIrgo and predictions for the number of sources that LISA will discover at high redshift.