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When:
September 9, 2021 @ 16:00 – 17:00
Europe/Copenhagen Timezone
2021-09-09T16:00:00+02:00
2021-09-09T17:00:00+02:00
Please join us for next week’s cake talk, given by Arianna Long (University of California, Irvine).
Missing Giants: The Impact of Dust-Obscuration on Stellar Mass Assembly Through Cosmic Time
Half of all cosmic starlight is absorbed and reprocessed by dust, which means that the widely-accepted cosmic history generated by visible-light telescopes is incomplete. The consequences of our biases are apparent in our most modern cosmological simulations, which struggle to produce sufficient populations of massive galaxies (M > 3 x 10^10 Msun) to match observations of the first 2 Gyr of the cosmos. These giants likely underwent rapid, violent, and bursty phases of star formation in order to reach such extreme masses, so early on. Such rapid stellar growth produces an overabundance of dust that obscures starlight, rendering the galaxies near-invisible at UV/optical wavelengths. In this work, I compile empirical data on massive, dusty, star-forming galaxies to create a numerical model that re-derives the primary function describing stellar mass assembly in the Universe: the stellar mass function (SMF). With my model, I extend the massive end of the SMF and create more massive star-forming galaxies throughout cosmic time. I forward evolve the model and show that, to first order, we can also successfully model the rapid build up of the massive quiescent galaxy population at z > 1 — aka the fated descendants of dusty, star-forming galaxies. I detail the impact of this model on our understanding of massive galaxy assembly, and briefly review our next steps towards predicting and characterizing the evolutionary properties of these massive, dust-obscured galaxies using next-generation telescopes.
