RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Thursday, 09 September 2021, 10:45-11:30; ZOOM


Jae Yoen (Marcie) Mun

"Thesis Proposal Talk: Spatially resolving the star formation activity of galaxies at 3 - 4 Gyrs of lookback time"

The cosmic star formation rate density is known to have declined by a factor of ~10 to present day after reaching its peak at z ~ 2. There were drastic differences in the star-forming conditions between z ~ 0 and z ~ 2, such that galaxies in the past were more star-forming, gas-rich, and had more turbulent interstellar media. Given the complexity of the star formation histories of galaxies, it is not trivial to pinpoint the exact physical mechanisms responsible for the decline of the star formation activity from z ~ 2 to z ~ 0. This motivates a further investigation with the Middle Ages Galaxy Properties with Integral Field Spectroscopy (MAGPI) survey, to study the spatially resolved star formation activity of galaxies at intermediate redshifts (z ~ 0.3). For this PhD thesis project, I propose to constrain the physical mechanisms responsible for the quenching of star formation activity at intermediate redshifts with the MAGPI survey. I will also be looking into connecting the low- and high-z universes with MAGPI, to better understand the full picture of star formation quenching. Moreover, I will be tying MAGPI observations with cosmological simulations to not only interpret the results, but also constrain the theory behind simulations.