42) Stellar populations of galactic bars and drivers of stellar metallicity in galaxies

Abstract: Stellar populations are relics of the galaxies' past and save imprints of the dynamical and chemical evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. Spatially resolved spectroscopic surveys offer the unique opportunity to study global and local drivers of stellar populations in galaxies. Thereby, they provide an extragalactic context for our detailed understanding of the Milky Way. In this talk, I will combine results from stellar population analysis of ~8,000 galaxies from the MaNGA survey with highly spatially resolved measurements of stellar populations in bars of the MUSE TIMER project. In the large-sample study with MaNGA, we use an unprecedented sample size of > 2 million spatial bins to constrain the drivers of stellar metallicity in different structures (bulge, bar, disc), galactocentric distances, local environments (i.e. surface mass density), and galaxy types. In particular, I will compare the results for Milky Way analogues with the whole population of galaxies. In addition, we use MUSE observation from the TIMER project to present detailed maps of resolved star formation histories in the bars of nine nearby galaxies. We compare our data to state-of-the-art cosmological magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of barred galaxies in Milky Way mass halos and show that our MUSE observations can be explained by the dynamical influence of the bar on stellar populations with different ages and kinematic properties.

Bio: I am an observational astronomer working as postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth. Before coming to the UK, I did my PhD on secular evolution in galaxies at the Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP, 2015-2019) supervised by Lutz Wisotzki and Dimitri Gadotti. During that time I spent two years in Chile with an ESO studentship (2016-2018). The main focus of my research is to develop a better understanding of the internal physical processes that shape galaxies, by analysing their structure, their stellar populations and their dynamics. I am particularly interested in galaxy bars: the main drivers of internal secular evolution, i.e. the evolution of galaxies in isolation. I am a member of the SDSS-IV/MaNGA , TIMER and CARS collaborations.