Resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies

解决了附近星系中的恒星种群问题

• 批准号: 2567276
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Durham University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2567276
• 关键词: Resolved; stellar; populations; nearby; galaxies

The lifecycle of star-forming galaxies is very complex: cold gas is turned into stars; the formed stellar populations stir, mix, enrich, heat, and expel the gas via stellar winds, radiation, and supernova explosions; the gas can then fall back onto the galaxy, cool, and form new generations of stars. While we qualitatively understand the involved physical processes governing the gas recycle, we still do not have a clear quantitative description of them. As a consequence, constraining how galaxies turn their gas into stars, how feedback from these stars disrupts gas and regulates the growth of galaxies, and how these processes have changed with galactic environment across cosmic time, is one of the fundamental problems in modern astrophysics.This project will address a key part in solving this problem by revealing and studying stellar populations in nearby galaxies. Indeed, nearby galaxies are our best laboratories to study the interplay between stars and gas: they provide the necessary numbers to study star formation across many different environments and, crucially, on the small and resolved scales at which the relevant physics happens.By combining data from the integral field spectrograph MUSE on the Very Large Telescope with data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the stellar population of the nearby galaxy NGC 300 will be studied at unprecedented levels of detail, and directly connected to the star-forming gas reservoir in the galaxy. Once in place, the developed analysis methods can then be applied to other nearby galaxies (observed e.g. with the SITELLE instrument on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope), therefore providing a framework to quantify the galactic lifecycle of gas and stars.

恒星形成星系的生命周期非常复杂：冷气体变成恒星;形成的恒星群通过恒星风、辐射和超新星爆炸搅拌、混合、浓缩、加热和排出气体;然后气体可以落回星系，冷却并形成新一代的恒星。虽然我们定性地了解了控制气体再循环的相关物理过程，但我们仍然没有对它们进行明确的定量描述。因此，星系如何将其气体转化为恒星，恒星的反馈如何干扰气体并调节星系的生长，以及这些过程如何随宇宙时间的星系环境而变化，是现代天体物理学的基本问题之一。本项目将通过揭示和研究邻近星系中的恒星种群来解决这一问题。事实上，附近的星系是我们研究恒星和气体之间相互作用的最佳实验室：它们提供了必要的数字来研究星星在许多不同环境中的形成，至关重要的是，在相关物理发生的小尺度和分辨率上。通过将甚大望远镜上的积分场摄谱仪MUSE的数据与哈勃太空望远镜的数据相结合，NGC 300附近星系的恒星数量将得到前所未有的详细研究，并直接与星系中的恒星形成气体库联系起来。一旦到位，开发的分析方法可以应用于其他附近的星系（例如，用加拿大-法国-夏威夷望远镜上的SITELLE仪器观察），从而提供一个框架来量化气体和恒星的星系生命周期。