Dave Sanders (University of Hawaii)

Dave Sanders colloquium: The Cosmic Evolution of Luminous and Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies...

Marsfield Lecture Theatre

Abstract

The Cosmic Evolution of Luminous and Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies: New Results from the GOALS and Herschel-COSMOS Surveys


Luminous and Ultra-luminous Infrared Galaxies (LIRGs, ULIRGs) represent perhaps the most powerful examples of a connection between the fueling of starbursts and active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Major mergers of gas-rich spirals, which are now understood to trigger the majority of LIRGs in the local universe, drive the bulk of the disk gas into the central kpc of the merger pair, where it provides fuel for both powerful nuclear starbursts and accretion onto a central massive black hole. The combined feedback from starburst and accretion luminosity eventually expels the gas, shutting down nuclear activity and leaving a gas-poor elliptical. Although there is now general agreement on the origin and evolutionary scenario for LIRGs, the detailed time evolution of starburst activity and black hole growth is still not well understood. We review the basic properties of LIRGs as determined from extensive multi-wavelength studies of a complete sample of local objects in the Great Observatories All-Sky LIRGs Survey (GOALS), and introduce new results from observations of fainter more distant LIRGs detected in the Spitzer and Herschel surveys of the HST -COSMOS 2-deg2 Field.