Claude-Andre Faucher-Giguere - Northwestern Univ. - Galaxy Formation at Northwestern: From the Big Bang to Stars and Black Holes

Wednesday 3 Apr 2019, 11:00 → 12:00 US/Central

F-108 (BLDG 362)

Galaxy formation is a core science driver of many current and upcoming astronomical facilities. Astrophysicists want to know how galaxy populations emerged from the Big Bang, as well as how stars and massive black holes formed in galaxies. For cosmologists, understanding galaxy formation is necessary to model how baryonic processes affect measurements of dark matter and dark energy. Owing to the extreme dynamic range of galaxy formation, advances are driven by combining insights from large-scale numerical simulations, analytic modeling, and observations. As I will be in residence at Argonne this spring, I will use this seminar to give a broad overview of the research done in the galaxy formation group at Northwestern. I will highlight some recent predictions from our high-resolution numerical simulations, ranging from the origins of stellar baryons, to the growth of supermassive black holes, to energetic black hole-driven winds.