Opening the National Astronomy Meeting this year will be Tim de Zeeuw, Director General-Designate of the European Southern Observatory. This will take place at 14:00 on Monday 16th April.
Deconstructing Nearby Galaxies: Reading the Fossil Record of Formation
Much world-wide effort is devoted to the study of the formation and evolution of galaxies, ranging from observations of the most distant objects in the early Universe to detailed analysis of the motions of individual stars in the Milky Way, combined with theoretical work and numerical simulations. Recent developments in optical instrumentation make it possible to measure the motions en physical properties of stellar populations in nearby galaxies, and to determine the properties of the supermassive black holes in their centres. A representative survey of nearby early-type galaxies and spiral bulges with SAURON, a panoramic integral-field spectrograph custom-built for the UK/NL/E 4.2m William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, reveal a fascinating diversity of properties. The observed stellar and gaseous kinematics and the line-strength distributions provide the intrinsic shape of the galaxies, their orbital structure, the mass-to-light ratio as a function of radius, the frequency of kinematically decoupled cores, the masses of nuclear black holes, and the relation between orbital structure and the age and metallicity of the stellar populations. This 'fossil record' provides key insight into the galaxy formation process. The talk will summarize the main results of the SAURON survey, and then discuss the next steps, including the possibilities provided by instrumentation on 8m class telescopes.
