Visiting the Macarthur Astronomical Society

Yesterday I was visiting my friends at the Macarthur Astronomical Society (MAS), which is based in Campbelltown, at the south of Sydney. I have had the privilege of visiting them several times in the last years, where I talked about different aspects of Astronomy, from the “Light of the Universe” to the “Colour of the galaxies” till “Amateur Spectroscopy“.

This time I was presenting my very own research, the Hi-KIDS project (the “HI KOALA IFS Dwarf galaxy Survey“, that I have to eventually publicize here too.

My talk was entitled “Dissecting Dwarf Galaxies with The AAT“. The abstract  was:

Dwarf galaxies provide fundamental clues about galaxy origin and evolution. Many of them have irregular shapes and have processed little their gas, although they possess many old stars born billions of years ago. Still, many dwarf galaxies are very gas-rich and are currently forming stars, sometimes in a spectacular way. With these new observations using the powerful KOALA+AAOmega instruments at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope we are “dissecting” these dwarf galaxies to characterize the properties of the gas and the stars within them. Combining these new data with deep radio observations at 21 cm of the diffuse, cold gas within and surrounding these dwarf galaxies we will get a better understanding of the local and global star-formation processes in galaxies, the feedback of the newborn stars into the galaxies, the importance of inflows and outflows of gas, and the chemical evolution of nearby dwarf galaxies.

You can find some photos of the talk in the Facebook webpage of the Macarthur Astronomical Society.

I have to say that this is a very welcome audience and that I have always enjoyed a lot the visit to MAS. They have an invited speaker almost every month, getting many Australian (and overseas) astrophysicists to talk to them. You can have a look to the full list in the MAS webpage.

Thanks for having me and see you in another astronomy event or talk soon!