Home > Leadership Development Seminars > 3. Interdisciplinary/space utilization seminar > Stellar mass selected dust mass function from GAMA and H-ATLAS

Stellar mass selected dust mass function from GAMA and H-ATLAS

Dust is a small but very important component of the interstellar medium. Around half of the light emitted by stars throughout cosmic history has been absorbed and re-emitted at longer wavelengths by dust, and so measuring and investigating dust gives a means of recovering this stolen starlight. Dust is also vital for many astrochemical processes, such as the production of molecular hydrogen. One fundamental measure of the dust content of galaxies is the Dust Mass Function (DMF), which is the volume density of galaxies as a function of Dust Mass. The volume accessible to a galaxy depends upon its absolute brightness, and any observational limits placed upon the survey - the most significant of which being the magnitude or flux limit. The accessible volume of a galaxy is used to weight the contribution that galaxy will make to the volume density of the discrete dust mass bin it falls into. I will present the DMF for the largest sample of galaxies to date, a stellar mass selected sample of galaxies comprised of the overlap between two large area surveys - the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA), and the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS). The overlap between these surveys spans 160 square degrees, and 21 wavebands, containing around 200,000 galaxies that are observable in the r-band. This study represents the most statistically robust measurement of the low-redshift DMF ever made, allowing us to probe at least an order of magnitude lower in dust mass than any survey before for a sample an order of magnitude larger than previous surveys.
  1. ALL
  2. »2017
  3. »2016
  4. »2015
  5. »2014
  6. »2013

↑ Return to Top

Return to Home