Galaxies SIG Seminar, October 6th, 2026
A Galaxy Doesn’t Forget: Why You Should Trust Your Resolved SFHs from Photometric Observations. Speaker: Charlotte Olsen | CUNY City Tech The post Galaxies SIG Seminar, October 6th, 2026 appeared first on NASA Science .
On October 6th, 2026, the Cosmic Origins Community hosted a seminar on galaxies at their monthly Science Interest Group meeting. The event focused on the importance of resolved star formation histories (SFHs) in understanding galaxy growth and quenching.
Speaker Charlotte Olsen from CUNY City Tech presented a study using the h277 Milky-Way-mass cosmological zoom simulation. This simulation, which accurately represents both molecular clouds and initial stellar dispersions, allowed Olsen to compare the actual radial distribution of star formation with the distribution inferred from resolved SFHs up to a lookback time of 1.6 billion years.
Olsen's research aimed to quantify the bias caused by stellar migration between spaxels in integral-field spectroscopy and multi-band photometry. By measuring migration rates in annuli matched to typical spaxel scales, she found that the radial profiles of resolved SFHs were consistent in slope and relative shape up to 1 Gyr lookback time. This consistency suggests that resolved SFHs can reliably provide insights into galaxy evolution, even when considering the challenges posed by stellar migration.
Written by urgent.news from NASA Science's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
