Bahcall Memorial Lecture
"Formation of Massive
Galaxies"
Prof. Jeremiah P. Ostriker Dept. of
Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
The physics and sequence of events behind the formation
of galaxies, the remarkable structures in which most of the stars in
the universe reside, has remained a long-standing puzzle. Now that we
have a quite definite cosmological model, providing us with a
quantitative picture of how perturbations grew from very low amplitude
fluctuations, we can perform the forward modeling of representative
pieces of the universe using standard physical processes, to see how
well our computer simulations match real, locally observed
galaxies. Finally, we can employ large ground and space based
telescopes to use the universe as a time machine – directly
observing the past history of our light-cone, and comparing with our
computed evolutionary tracks. I will present the coherent and
plausible picture that emerges and that leads naturally to the mass,
size, scale and epoch of galaxy formation.
Host:
Prof. Dan Maoz, x8538
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