Calendar of Events

Speaker: Karen Masters (Haverford)

The morphology of a galaxy provides information on the orbits of stars within it. As such, important clues to the formation history of galaxies is revealed by their morphologies, and this information is complimentary, but not identical to, their star formation history and chemical composition as revealed by photometry and spectra.

The Galaxy Zoo project (www.galaxyzoo.org) has provided quantitative visual morphologies for over a million galaxies (including the entire Sloan Digital Sky Surveys, or SDSS Main Galaxy Sample), and has been part of a reinvigoration of interest in the morphologies of galaxies and what they reveal about the evolution of galaxies. Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA, part of SDSS-IV), is well over halfway through its 6 year plan to obtain spatially resolved spectral maps for 10,000 nearby galaxies (all of which have Galaxy Zoo morphologies). MaNGA is now by far the largest sample of resolved spectroscopy in the world, with over 6000 galaxies observed. The most recent data release from MaNGA happened in December 2018.

In this talk I will review these projects, and show results from them which demonstrate why a resolved view of the internal morphology in large samples of galaxies is interesting and how it provides a unique constraint of our understanding of galaxy evolution.

Host: Andrew Baker