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May 21, 2026
Dear all,
Please join us on the upcoming DAWN Day for a special seminar by Gergö Popping (ESO). This seminar will be held at NBB and will be 1 hour long, including questions.
Gergö will visit DTU on Tue/Wed, May 19/20 and will be around NBB in the afternoon of
the DAWN Day (May 21) for chats. Please sign up here to talk with him: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OxJjWMlV9GvFRATwQ54Cj-2LPRi46JzTjK1t2pygzEU/edit?usp=sharing
Title: Beyond the Monsters: Revealing the dust and cold gas properties of sub-solar metallicity galaxies at cosmic noon with ALMA
At the peak of cosmic star formation (z~2; Cosmic Noon) the molecular gas density of the universe was an order of magnitude higher than today, with the majority of activity occurring in dust-obscured environments. While ALMA has successfully characterized the most massive systems of this era, the "normal" lower-mass galaxies responsible for the bulk of stellar mass assembly remain largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present the ALMA Chemical Evolution (ACE) Large Program, a systematic effort to characterize the interstellar medium (ISM) of sub-solar metallicity galaxies at Cosmic Noon.
By targeting CO emission and dust continuum in 25 galaxies at z=2-2.5, ACE extends current datasets to an order of magnitude lower in mass and metallicity, reaching levels down to 30% solar. I will discuss our findings on H2 scaling relations at these unprecedented stellar masses and how these can be used to constrain mass loading factors and galactic feedback. I will then present the dust SED properties of these low-mass systems, specifically addressing how the dust temperature changes with metallicity and stellar mass at Cosmic Noon. Next, I will focus on the dust scaling relations of Cosmic Noon galaxies, presenting the novel constraints on the dust-to-gas ratio of galaxies at sub-solar metallicities during this epoch. I will finish by discussing how ongoing observational campaigns and the synergy with JWST are pushing these studies toward resolved properties, mapping the physical distribution of gas and dust in the low-mass regime for the first time.
