May Monthly Meeting – Spatially Resolved Galaxy Evolution

Our meetings include brief business, a main presentation and items of astronomical news or learning from members.

The May Main Item will be the Arthur Page Memorial Lecture : Spatially Resolved Galaxy Evolution by Dr Sarah Sweet
Synopsis and biography below.

The May 2023 meeting is planned to be a face-to-face meeting; attendees can also join in online via Zoom. Details emailed to members. Guests/visitors can contact us for Zoom details at .
Visitors are welcome to join our face-to-face or online meetings.

Synopsis
How do the clumpy, irregular galaxies in the distant, long-ago Universe become the familiar Hubble types we see today? Galaxies undergo such extreme physical changes during their lifetimes that galaxies at high redshift cannot be adequately understood with classification schemes designed for galaxies in the local Universe. For example, traditional, image-based methods such as bulge-disk decomposition are defined on the appearance of the majority of present-day galaxies, but fail for most galaxies at high redshift, which have neither identifiable bulges nor well-defined disks. In this talk I will describe my research into angular momentum, which can be measured for all types of galaxies, and its connection to visual appearance of galaxies.

Dr. Sarah Sweet delivered the third Page Memorial lecture in 2013, during her final year of studies of tidal dwarf galaxies for a Ph.D. degree at UQ. From 2014 to 2016 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, Canberra, where she studied the morphological evolution of galaxies with cosmic time. In 2017, Sarah moved to Swinburne University of Technology to take up a position as Postdoctoral Research Fellow. Sarah returned to Brisbane in 2020 when she was appointed as Lecturer in Astrophysics. Her research field concerns the formation and evolution of galaxies within the local to high-redshift Universe