Giovedì 20 maggio alle ore 16:30, la Dr. Laura Ferrarese dell’Herzberg Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Centre, Victoria-Canada, terrà il web-seminar dal titolo: The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey.

Abstract

At a distance of 16.5 Mpc and with a gravitating mass of 4×10^14 solar masses, the Virgo Cluster is the dominant mass concentration in the local universe, the centre of the Local Supercluster, and the largest concentration of galaxies within 35 Mpc. With thousands of member galaxies lying at a nearly common distance and spanning virtually all known morphological types, it has historically played a key role in studies of how galaxies form and evolve in dense environments. It is the most thoroughly studied cluster of galaxies in the universe, and remains a preferred target for studies of baryonic substructures in the low-redshift universe. In this talk, I will describe an ambitious optical imaging survey of the Virgo cluster — the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) — carried out with the MegaPrime instrument on the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). The NGVS addresses a wide range of fundamental astrophysical questions, including: the faint-end shape of the luminosity function, the characterization of galaxy scaling relations over a factor of ten million in mass, the cluster/intracluster medium/galaxy connection, and the fossil record of star formation and chemical enrichment in dense environments. I will present an overview of the NGVS and summarize some of scientific highlights from the survey.

Web-seminar ad accesso riservato.