Dr. Sanskriti Das

The hot circumgalactic medium (CGM) is an energy repository of galactic feedback and harbors a significant fraction of metals and baryons missing from the galactic disks. However, due to extraordinary observational challenges, the hot CGM remains the least understood component of galaxies. Studying the hot CGM was not the objective of the current X-ray or mm facilities during the design phase. However, as an excellent byproduct, observing the hot CGM has emerged as a promising field over the last two decades, coming at the forefront of priority science goals for the current and upcoming decades. I will discuss three snippets of our recent efforts to detect and characterize the hot CGM: 1) X-raying the Milky Way: investigating thermal, kinematic, and chemical anomalies, 2) Testing self-similarity: stacking thousands of galaxies in mm (Sunyaev-Zeldovich Effect) to identify the primary determinant of the ionized CGM energetics, and 3) Is hot CGM detectable? Deep X-ray spectroscopy of individual galaxies. I will highlight how our findings provide insights into the impact of galactic feedback on the hot CGM, establish our confidence in leveraging current telescopes to inform theoretical simulations, and set a benchmark for designing experiments with next-generation X-ray and mm facilities.