ACP Seminar (Astronomy - Cosmology - Particle Physics)

Speaker: Risa Wechsler (KIPAC/Stanford University)
Title: The Galaxy-Dark Matter Connection across Mass and Time
Date (JST): Thu, Feb 02, 2012, 16:30 - 18:00
Place: Seminar Room A
Abstract: Recent surveys have mapped out the distribution of tens of millions of galaxies in the local Universe and measured galaxy properties for smaller samples over the last 13 billion years. I will describe a framework for understanding these observations self-consistently within the context of the current standard cosmological model, LambdaCDM, which makes specific predictions for the evolution of structure. Dark matter halos are the fundamental unit of structure formation and they provide the basis of our modern understanding of galaxy formation. I will discuss new limits on the connection between galaxy properties and their dark matter hosts over a range of masses and redshifts. In the context of a given cosmological model, I will show how the galaxy-halo relation can be tightly constrained at low redshift with current data, and how the galaxy-halo connection can be used to infer the full star formation histories of galaxies. I will then discuss implications of these results for the modeling of galaxies in the largest current and planned sky surveys.