Jesús Falcón-Barroso
Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias

The large diversity among galaxies from irregular dwarf galaxies, grand-design spirals to big elliptical galaxies is evident from their optical images, in particular those from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the 1920's when Hubble constructed his sequence, galaxies where believed to evolve from ellipticals to spirals. Nowadays, with the advent of large observational surveys and numerical simulations, spirals are actually the starting point of a hierarchical build-up of galaxies ending in ellipticals. Even so, many questions remain on the formation and evolution of galaxies.

In this presentation, we will provide the most up-to-date view on galaxies across the Hubble sequence. We will describe how the use of a novel observational technique known as integral-field spectroscopy helps us to search for the fossil records of the formation history of galaxies in the local Universe. We will use the latest results from the international CALIFA survey to expose the intimate life of galaxies in 3D: from the structural and chemical composition of gas and stars to their motions that allow us to probe also the unseen, so-called dark matter in galaxies.

Palestra dada em conjunto com Glenn van de Ven (Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy)

17 outubro 2013, 22:00

Centro de Astrofísica
Rua das Estrelas
4150-762 Porto