The DYNAMO Survey of Clumpy, Star-Forming Galaxies at Low Redshift


Monday, 24 March 2014 9 a.m. — 10 a.m. MST

AURA Lecture Hall

NOIRLab South Colloquia
ROB BASSETT (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia and Gemini South Visiting Astronomer)

The DYNAMO survey is a project started at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia as an integral field unit spectroscopy (IFS) study of nearby galaxies. The original goal of this project was to examine resolution effects inherent in IFS studies of clumpy, extremely star-forming galaxies at z>1. A surprising result of this pilot study was that a significant portion of the most H-alpha luminous galaxies from SDSS at redshifts of 0.07 and 0.1 were found to exhibit disk like rotation and turbulent ionized gas (evident from large velocity dispersions) similar to galaxies studied at high redshift. This has spawned a multiwavelength follow up study from optical wavelengths to radio. I will present an overview of our preliminary results with a strong focus on GMOS-IFU observations of gas and stellar kinematics of two z~0.1 clumpy, disk galaxies.