Speaker Name:
Benne Holwerda
Speaker Affiliation:
UCT
Talk Subject:
Grains in Island Universes: What counting distant galaxies can tell us about interstellar dust
Date:
08/18/2010 - 13:00
Venue:
RW James C
Dust is a ubiquitous component of the interstellar matter in galaxies.
It scatters and dims stellar light, and only radiating in the infra-red, if that.
Very cold dust (T~10 K) may not radiate much at all.
If we want to understand galaxies, we need to understand where dust in
a typical galaxy is. To do so, we need a known background of light sources.
For my PhD I used the distant galaxies seen through a spiral galaxy disk
in Hubble Space Telescope images as the known background of light.