Evolution of Galaxies and Clusters of Galaxies

Gerald Cecil
Fabian Heitsch
Sheila Kannappan

Detailing Feedback Processes in the Local Universe (Cecil)
Gerald Cecil and students are currently building astronomical and medical spectral imagers in the Goodman Laboratory, designing MHD galactic wind simulations with Prof. Heitsch, collecting high-quality integrated light NIR spectra of stellar populations in post-starburst galaxies, and preparing for imaging spectroscopy of diverse targets with SOAR's laser-guided AO system --- all preliminaries to science that are enabled by UNC's access to SOAR and Goodman Spectrograph.

Structure Growth in the Cosmic Web (Kannappan)>
Kannappan's group is working toward a unified picture of structure growth, from individual galaxies up to the filaments and clusters of the cosmic web, focusing on three questions: How do disk galaxies like our Milky Way survive and grow? How does cosmic gas fuel star formation, from bulk flows in the cosmic web to internal fueling cycles within galaxies? Where is the mass in the Universe, including dark matter and elusive .missing baryons.? The RESOLVE (REsolved Spectroscopy Of a Local VolumE) Survey, an unprecedented census of visible and invisible mass in 53,000 cubic Mpc of the local cosmic web, addresses all three questions. The survey fully exploits UNC.s generous and flexible SOAR/SALT access with both formidable observing time demands and a corollary requirement of custom efficiency-enhancing instrumentation. Other Kannappan group research is complementary and multi-wavelength, e.g., analyzing ultra massive star clusters as probes of galaxy merger histories or measuring the evolution of galaxy gas content over cosmic time directly.

Towards Understanding Galactic Matter Cycles (Heitsch)
Heitsch's computational astrophysics research addresses three questions relevant for understanding galactic matter cycles: (1) What controls the star formation efficiency in our Galaxy and beyond? (2) What enables the rapid mixing of gas to explain the chemical homogeneity in star clusters as well as the presence of certain supernova ejecta in the solar system? (3) Where does the Galactic star formation fuel come from, and how is it integrated into the disk?