Exploring Galaxies in Our Cosmic Backyard - Livestream

Galaxies are gravitationally-bound conglomerates of gas and stars with a very wide range of masses. They contain from a few thousand stars in the case of dwarf galaxies, to tens of billions like the Milky Way (our own galaxy), to up to thousand billions of stars in the most massive galaxies known to date. In this lecture, Prof. Sales will take you on a tour to explore the diverse population of nearby galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, as well as many dwarf galaxies discovered in our local neighborhood. She will also discuss how these observations have helped us develop current theories on galaxy formation and how we can use nearby galaxies to study the nature of dark matter.

Speaker: Laura Sales, UC Riverside