Flamsteed Lecture: How to Kill a Galaxy - Black Holes, Noisy Neighbours, and Cosmic Car Crashes

Galaxies are a key building block of our universe, that grow over time through accretion of gas and star formation. However, it seems our universe does not allow galaxies to go on building up forever. Instead, in many cases, their “active” lives seem to be truncated - leaving them “red and dead”, evolving passively at the present day.

In this talk, Dr Tim Davis will discuss the variety of processes we think act to kill galaxies: from the impact of supermassive black holes lurking in their hearts, through the perils of living in an environment with lots of other galaxies, to the extreme processes ongoing in a galaxy collision.

He will illustrate this with snapshots of his own work using state-of-the-art observations from large telescopes all over the globe, and computer simulations of galaxy formation that let us conduct controlled experiments. Together these techniques let us explore how the Universe gets away with galactic murder, on the grandest of scales.

About the speaker

Dr Tim Davis is a senior lecturer and astrophysicist in the Cardiff Hub for Astrophysics Research and Technology at Cardiff University. Dr Davis’ research uses telescopes around the world to understand gas, dark matter, star formation and the impact that supermassive black holes have on galaxies as they form and evolve. He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Warwick, and his doctorate at Oxford University. He has worked at the European Southern Observatory, and the University of Hertfordshire in the past, before moving to Cardiff eight years ago.

Please note that this event will take place in the Queen's House.