How Galaxies Die - Livestream

Galaxies are beautiful and enormous groups of billions of stars. Galaxies can be very active, spinning rapidly, forming new stars, and cycling through cosmic gas similarly to how a person might breathe. Sometimes they can almost feel alive. And like all living things, eventually they die. Some die spectacularly, being shredded into twisting streams of stars by larger galaxies, and some age slowly until they become inactive collections of old and dying stars.

Most astronomers believe that the key to understanding how galaxies die is dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance which makes up most of the mass in the universe. Although we currently don’t know much about dark matter at atomic scales, we know an incredible amount about its behavior at large distances and about its relationship with galaxies. The lives of galaxies are completely dominated by the dark matter around them, moving where the dark matter makes them move, growing when the dark matter allows them to grow, and dying when the dark matter forces them to die.

This talk will explore the fates of galaxies and their connection to dark matter.

Speaker: Dr. Phil Mansfield,Stanford University

See weblink to attend the talk.