Evento

A Conversation with the Stars

Galaxies are collections of many billions of stars embedded in invisible dark matter halos weighting many trillions of tons organized into structures that can span many millions of lightyears. Yet, despite these exotic---even unfathomable---features, galaxies grow, change, and interact in ways that can seem remarkably human. Dr. Louis Abramson, a post doctoral research at UCLA, will describe the galaxy lifecycle and the factors influencing it, highlighting how these naturally (and not too inaccurately) reflect our own understanding of how biology and society shape human lives. For, just like us, galaxies have an early period of vigorous, socially induced growth, a long span of productive maturation, and (alas) an inevitable death. Just like us, external factors like environment, and internal factors like size, shape, and mass seem to predict the length and quality of a galaxys life. So while this anthropomorphism is not how astronomers quantitatively approach theories of galaxy evolution, it does capture most of the key aspects any such theory must explain---and much of the academic debate surrounding them. Hence, its not too unfair to say that, with a little self reflection, we might better understand what turned an empty early universe into one filled with the multitude of galaxies we see today.

Louis Abramson was born in New York and grew up in New Jersey. He got a BA in physics from Columbia University in 2009, and a PhD in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 2015. Since then, he has been at UCLA. While he doggedly refers to himself as an observer, he has spent most of the last few years thinking about how observations of galaxies inform very basic ideas of how and why these objects change over time. As this frequently has him asking things like, What is redness? he is grateful to his boss who keeps him grounded working on a large Hubble Space Telescope survey based on gravitational lensing.