AAO Colloquium


Thursday, 17 March 2011

AAO Conference Room 3:30 PM

Digging up the Dirt on Galaxies with Herschel-ATLAS

Loretta Dunne,   Nottingham

Herschel-ATLAS is the widest area survey being carried out with the Herschel Space Observatory. It will cover 550 square degrees in 5 FIR/sub-mm bands from 100-500 microns and detect ~200,000 sources out to z~3. One of the main goals of H-ATLAS is to carry out the first benchmark for dust and obscured star formation in the 'local' Universe out to z=0.5 as Herschel is sensitive to all the dust in a galaxy (not just the warm stuff as IRAS was). To make the best use of the Herschel data we have positioned some of our fields in the GAMA regions and there is a great opportunity to link the two surveys in order to understand the dusty galaxies in Herschel-ATLAS. In this talk I will give an overview of the survey and what we are learning about the evolution of dust and obscuration in galaxies over the past 4 billion years.