Cosmology Seminar: Max Gronke

Max Gronke is a PhD student at the ITA

One line to rule them all - or: fun stuff with Lyman-alpha

Lyman-alpha (Lya) is the most prominent emission line in the Universe,
and it provides a unique window into the high redshift Universe.
In this student-friendly talk, I will discuss some examples on how Lya
observables can be used to study, for instance, the Epoch of
Reionization, and the composition of the interstellar, circumgalactic
in intergalactic medium.
To do this I will give an overview about these subjects as well as an
introduction to Lya radiative transfer. This will include some more
recent results which suggest that the `clumpiness' is a critical
parameter influencing radiative transfer, and that the Lya spectrum is
in fact sensitive to features on far smaller scales than other
observational techniques. These results explain a number of puzzling
observations, including evidence for tiny-scale structure in the gas
and the fact that the spectra are best fit by homogeneous models,
despite our knowledge that the ISM and CGM are multiphase.

Organizer

Bridget Falck and Benjamin Racine
Published Feb. 10, 2017 3:48 PM - Last modified Feb. 10, 2017 3:48 PM