Speaker
Description
Massive galaxies are crucial for understanding how matter is assembled in the Universe as they contain more than half of the stars in today’s Universe and are also the birthplace of many chemical elements. A few billion years after the Big Bang, intense star formation episodes created so-called red nuggets: ultra-compact massive galaxies that grew into the massive early-type galaxies that we observe today through mergers and accretion. To understand the earliest phases of massive galaxy formation, relic galaxies are great laboratories. They are ultra-compact massive galaxies that formed very early on when the Universe was very young, but then slipped through cosmic time completely undisturbed, retaining the fossil records of their formation.
In my talk, I will present the first spatially resolved spectroscopic observations of a relic galaxy beyond the local universe: MUSE narrow-field mode observations of J1447-0149. From integrated spectroscopy, the galaxy is known to have an intermediate degree of relicness, making it a prime candidate to spatially resolve in-situ versus ex-situ stellar populations. I will present first results on its matter content, internal structure, assembly path, and also discuss observational challenges.