CCA Short Talks with Marc Huertas-Company

Investigating the link between quenching and bulge growth with artificial intelligence

The life of a galaxy is a tight balance between processes that trigger the formation of stars and others that tend to reduce or stop the star-formation activity. Understanding how this balance works and therefore how mass is assembled, is a fundamental question that needs to be tackled to advance in our understanding of galaxy evolution. In this talk I will discuss the relation between morphological / structure transformations of massive galaxies and their star-formation activity. I will focus particularly on the physical mechanisms that provoke the growth of a central over density of stars in the galaxy (bulge) and how this relates to the quenching of star-formation. We use advanced machine intelligence techniques to follow the evolution of global and resolved morphologies of galaxies from z~3 and track down how morphological transformations are reflected in the integrated and resolved star-formation activity. The same techniques are also used to analyze mock images of high resolution hydrodynamic cosmological simulations.