AAO Colloquium


Thursday, 3 February 2011

4:00pm AAO Conference Room

Galaxy Halos: here be Dragons

Duncan Forbes,   Swinburne

I will present the latest results of several years work on elliptical galaxy halos using the Hubble Space Telescope and 8-10m class ground-based telescopes. In particular, I use globular clusters and galaxy starlight to better understand the halos of ellipticals. This gives metallicity gradients and kinematics out to radii that are larger than has generally been possible for elliptical galaxies. New evidence for a two-phase build-up of mass in giant ellipticals is presented.