RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Thursday, 08 September 2016, 11:00-12:00; Duffield Lecture Theatre


Themiya Nanayakkara

"In-situ IMF at z~2"

The development of sensitive Near Infra-Red instruments has made it possible to study the galaxy properties at z~2, just 3Gy after the Big Bang. This is expected to be the time period where galaxies are actively star forming and evolving rapidly to form the massive galaxies that are observed in our local neighbourhood. ZFIRE is a survey, which utilises the MOSFIRE instrument on Keck telescope over 18 nights to study properties of ZFOURGE selected mass complete galaxies in rich environments at z~2. In my talk I will present results of our attempt to constrain the Initial Mass Function (IMF) of galaxies at these redshifts using a cluster and a field sample. We have investigated the degeneracy between the star formation histories and the IMF to make strong constrains on the stellar mass distribution of these galaxies using synthetic stellar spectra. I will focus on the role of dust, star-bursts, stellar rotation, binaries, and metallicity on determining observed galaxy properties at z~2 to address whether ZFIRE results favour the canonical concept of a universal IMF.