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Astronomy & Astrophysics
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UCSC Galaxy Formation Work Featured in Science News Work by UCSC cosmologists and their collaborators is featured in this week's Science News (Mar 22, 2008). The focus is on the rate at which gas cools and falls onto galaxies and how this modulates galactic star formation rates. The basic notion is that gas cooling is reduced when the mass of a galaxy's dark-matter halo grows above roughly one trillion solar masses. This threshold was posited nearly thirty years ago in seminal work by, among others, Professors George Blumenthal, Joel Primack, and Sandra Faber of the UCSC Astronomy and Physics departments. The same model has been picked up and greatly expanded recently by their collaborator Avishai Dekel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, himself a frequent visitor to UCSC and a member of the Santa Cruz Cosmology Center. Dekel's current work is described at length in the Science News article. The cooling threshold model also featured prominently in a recent plenary talk by Faber on galaxy formation at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society. As Faber discussed there, the DEEP2 Survey led by herself and colleagues David Koo and Raja Guhathakurta of the UCSC Astronomy Department has found tentative Also mentioned in the article was related work by UCSC astronomer Xavier Prochaska and his colleague Art Wolfe from UCSD, who have found that star-formation proceeds most intensely in the most massive dark-matter halos at early times. This is what the cooling theory predicts, that massive halos start growing early, get started making stars early, but then shut down early on crossing the halo mass threshold. |
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