Publications and Research
Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
5-9-2024
Abstract
Nearly all of the ordinary matter in the universe is located in galaxies, which are made up stars, gas, dust, and black holes, and range in size from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand light years across. Galaxies come in different shapes, but many of them are spiral shaped, and some of those have a central bulge region that is distinct from the rest of the galactic disk. This project used a large data set of galaxies that had their bulge and disk components separated to see what correlations those fractions of each galaxy have with other galaxy properties, including total stellar mass and redshift. Binned statistics techniques were used to reduce the noise in the data. The relationships between the bulge radius and total mass and the disk radius and total mass showed strong linear correlations. The relationship between bulge to total ratio and total mass showed that the bulge fraction increases with mass dramatically at first and then declines slowly with mass, for both the mass ratio and the luminosity ratio. This information can be used to constrain galaxy formation models to learn more about how the universe came to be as it is today.
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Comments
This poster was presented at the 40th Semi-Annual Dr. Janet Liou-Mark Honors & Undergraduate Research Poster Presentation, May 9, 2024. Mentor: Prof. Ariyeh Maller (Physics).