Skip to content
Menu
Astronomy Seminar Series artwork
November 8, 202111:30 am – 12:30 pm (CDT)

Cosmic Survey at the Low Surface Brightness Limit: Diffuse Light in Galaxies and Galaxy Clusters

Speaker:

Yuanyuan Zhang (Fermilab & Texas A&M University)

Host:

Stephanie Ho

Location:

Address:

Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics & Astronomy

College Station, Texas 77843

Event Details

The enormous amount of data collected by ongoing optical cosmic surveys provide great opportunities to explore extragalactic low-surface-brightness astronomical features. In this talk, I will discuss how we study faint diffuse light in galaxies and galaxy clusters with data from the Dark Energy Survey. By analyzing the images of a few hundreds of galaxy clusters, we measure the profiles of diffuse intra-cluster light beyond a surface brightness limit of 30 mag/arcsec^2, out to 1 Mpc from cluster center. The measurements allow us to further quantify the correlation between the intra-cluster light luminosity and galaxy cluster richness, and estimate the implications for cosmological studies. Finally, Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time have the potential to significantly improve our understanding of those extra-galactic low-surface brightness features in the coming decade.

Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved, Texas A&M University Trademark | Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843