Seminar: What can we learn from surveys of atomic and molecular gas in nearby galaxies?

Prof Guinevere Kauffmann 

Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany

Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico

Download the pdf poster.

I will present some highlights from GASS, the Galex Arecibo SDSS Survey, as well its sister survey COLD GASS. These surveys are characterizing the atomic and molecular hydrogen content of a sample of ~1000 nearby galaxies with stellar masses greater than 10^10 M_sol down to gas fraction limits of a few percent.

These surveys will allow us to understand the balance between atomic and molecular gas in nearby galaxies, and how these gas properties scale with other global galaxy properties such as stellar masses and star formation rates. By studying outliers from the scaling relations between gas fraction and the stellar content of galaxies, we learn more about the processes that regulate accretion from the external environment and ongoing star formation in the present-day population.