Speaker
Neven Tomicic
(MPIA)
Description
The cold interstellar medium (ISM) provides the raw materials out of which stars form. However, many open questions remain regarding how cooling, phase transitions, star formation, and feedback interplay, what the effects of both local and global environment on these processes are, and how they connect to large scale galaxy evolution. Many of these processes, which occur on <<100 pc spatial scales, are well studied in our own Milky Way but only now accessible in external galaxies using new instruments. This PhD project will use a variety of tracers of the dust and cold gas in the nearby spiral galaxy M31 to examine the distribution and properties of the cold ISM at sub-100 pc scales. I will study the impact of the radiation field as a function of scale length, test the assumption that the dust acts as a good tracer of the cold molecular gas, and examine the source of PAH emission. This observational project will make use of imaging and spectroscopic data from state-of-the-art optical through (sub-)millimeter instruments and link these data to theoretical models to gain more insights in the physics regulating the evolution of the ISM.
Author
Neven Tomicic
(MPIA)
Co-authors
Eva Schinnerer
(MPIA)
Kathryn Kreckel
(MPIA)