H2020Индивидуална стипендия2017–2019

eGALISM · Characterizing properties of the interstellar medium to better understand how stars form in galaxies

„Хоризонт 2020“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2017-02-01 → 2019-03-21
Финансиране от ЕС: 173 076 €
Участници: 1
Схема: MSCA-IF-EF-ST

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Междузвезният газ и прах в далечни галактики се анализират, за да се разбере как се формират новите звезди. Това помага да се разберат механизмите, които определят химичния състав и развитието на галактиките през космическото време.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Characterizing properties of the interstellar medium to better understand how stars form in galaxies

The universe hosts a zoo of galaxies with different sizes and shapes. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is a rather large and massive spiral galaxy, with 250 billion stars and about one new star forming every year. At early epochs of the universe, galaxies were smaller but forming stars at higher rates. How actively stars are forming in galaxies is an important aspect of galaxy evolution as it determines the chemical make-up and the dynamical state of galaxies. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate the star-formation activity of galaxies and how those mechanisms vary with the evolutionary stage of a galaxy are active areas of research and necessary steps to address fundamental questions such as: When and where do stars form in galaxies? What is fueling star formation? How does the star-formation activity shape galaxies through cosmic times? There are multiple size scales in the process of star formation. On the largest, galaxy-wide scales, the material in galaxies - the interstellar medium (99 percent gas and 1 percent dust) - needs to cool. It then contracts and fragments into clouds down to smaller scales until the collapse of clouds on the smallest scales. While the small-scale processes are best studied in our own Milky Way, the current main challenge to understand star formation in external galaxies is to quantify the amount, composition, and state of the material on the large scales. To this end, the goal of my project was to better characterize the properties of the interstellar medium of galaxies that is linked to the formation of new stars. My project relied on an innovative approach, combining the analysis of a large set of new multi-wavelength observations from space and ground-based telescopes and building state-of-the-art object-specific spectral synthesis models. With this, I have constrained, for the first time, the cooling, physical conditions, topology, masses, and star-formation efficiencies in a range of galaxies, which are key parameters that link the interstellar medium to the star-formation activity in galaxies.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

The complex interplay between the interstellar medium (ISM) and the stars that it gives birth to is central to studies of galaxy evolution. The properties of the ISM, and especially its capacity to cool, determine when and where star formation occurs. Those properties are well-known in the Milky Way but not in external galaxies. Only recently has the extragalactic community dedicated effort to obtain very rich archives of the ISM tracers (dust, CO and now [CII]) from both space and ground based observatories, but we currently lack a detailed multi-wavelength and multiphase modeling that can exploit the data in a self-consistent way.The goal of this proposal is to characterize the ISM properties, physical conditions and structure, in nearby spiral and dwarf galaxies. For this, I will exploit the spectral and spatial information of those state-of-the-art observations, in particular from the Herschel, Spitzer and SOFIA telescopes, and build multiphase radiative transfer models to interpret the data and disentangle the main ISM phases present in those galaxies. I will analyze the effects of physical scales and of environment such as metallicity, SFR, AGN activity on the derived ISM properties in order to calibrate [CII] and CO as precise diagnostics of star formation. One of the main objectives is to better understand the physics and origin of the emission of [CII] in galaxies, as it is becoming a workhorse diagnostic in galaxies of the distant universe.This innovative project will be carried out at CEA (France) where it will be integrated in the existing expertise on the dust, Local Group and distant galaxies, and numerical simulations. This complementarity is essential to achieve the ambitious goals of this project and provides a unique opportunity for knowledge growth.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

COMMISSARIAT A L ENERGIE ATOMIQUE ET AUX ENERGIES ALTERNATIVES · ParisКоординаторФранция