DR. LUCA CORTESE

One of the most outstanding challenges in extragalactic astronomy is to identify the astrophysical processes responsible for transforming simple dark matter haloes into the heterogenous population of galaxies inhabiting today’s Universe. How did different morphological types form and evolve? Does the environment where a galaxy lives influence its evolution? Inevitably, the answers to these questions entail a detailed investigation of all the components of the interstellar medium (gas, dust, metals) and their relation to stellar properties, kinematics and environment. This clearly requires multi-wavelength information for statistically significant samples of galaxies across the cosmic web, which are becoming available only now. In this talk, the speaker will take advantage of state-of-the-art surveys across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, to demonstrate how the synergy between different observatories is critical in order to make progress in this field. In particular, he will focus on the importance of resolved gas and stellar kinematics maps for unveiling the origin of galaxy morphology, and reveal the effects of environment on the star formation cycle of galaxies.