Friday, October 28, 2011, 3pm
Innovation Hall room 136
Jason Tumlinson
Space Telescope Science Institute
Gas
and Metals in the Halos
of Galaxies: The News from HST
In recent years we have come to appreciate the great importance of the
gas just outside galaxies - the circumgalactic medium - to galaxy
formation and evolution. I will briefly survey the intellectual history
of this subject before presenting the latest results from two large
Hubble projects that are using the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to
systemically characterize the gaseous halos of low-redshift galaxies.
COS has uncovered a clear link between star formation and ionized gas
in gaseous halos beyond 100 kpc. Furthermore, we find that the gaseous
halos of star-forming galaxies may contain more mass in metals than the
interstellar medium of these same galaxies. I will discuss the
importance of these results for the formation and evolution of galaxies
in general.