Download Project Title: Quantitative Galaxy Evolution Supervisor(s): Project

Project Title:
Quantitative Galaxy Evolution
Supervisor(s):
Prof Steve Eales
Project Description:
A surprisingly large amount of research on galaxies still relies on the Hubble
sequence, Hubble's attempt to classify galaxies based on their appearance on
photographic plates. One of the reasons why quantitative measurements of
nearby galaxies are still rather rare is that until recently galaxy-evolution
theories were quite primitive, making few and very imprecise predictions
about the properties of galaxies.
However, numerical simulations are now making precise quantitative
predictions of the properties of galaxies in the nearby Universe, and the data
to test these predictions exists, although nobody has yet used the data to
make the measurements of galaxy properties necessary to test the models.
This project consists of two parts. Both parts of the project will use the
Herschel Reference Survey, our Herschel survey of 323 nearby galaxies, for
which superb data at all wavelengths exists.
The first part of the project will be to use the data to make quantitative
estimates of the properties of all the galaxies, such as the rate at which stars
are forming in each galaxy, the mass of stars, the bulge-to-disk ratio and
many other properties. These results will then be compared with the
predictions of numerical simulations, such as EAGLE and Illustris. The second
part of the project will be to use the optical spectra of the galaxies to deduce
what these galaxies looked like in the past – and so to back-engineer their
evolutionary history.
To discuss this project further, please contact:
Supervisor: Prof Steve Eales
Email: [email protected]