“What’s Your Story? Deciphering galaxy formation histories from present-day properties“
Since around 100 years it has been known that our Milky Way is not the only island of stars in the Universe. Many other galaxies have since been found, featuring an immense variety of properties. Diverse morphologies, kinematics, and structures in their outskirts indicate that galaxies can have very different formation pathways. Over the years, our general understanding of galaxy evolution has improved through an increasing amount of observations and simulations. But what about an individual galaxy? What possibilities do we have to decipher the formation history of a single galaxy from its observed present-day properties?
Using a broad range of observables in galaxies and comparing them between observations and simulations, I will present how these can be related to the formation histories of galaxies and thus be used as indicators for an individual galaxy’s past. For this, I will show what information is encoded in the inner kinematics of galaxies, the low surface brightness structures found in their outskirts, and in the properties of so-called tracer populations: globular clusters and planetary nebulae.