Seminars and Colloquia

The LMC's Bar: New Insights Into a Long Standing PuzzleAstrophysics Seminar

by Himansh Rathore (University of Arizona)

Asia/Kolkata
Auditorium

Auditorium

Description

The LMC bar's structure, dynamics and its role in the evolution of the host's Interstellar Medium has been a persistent debate. The bar is offset from the disk center, tilted with respect to the disk plane and has no signatures in gas. Gaia DR3 brings a novel opportunity to study the LMC's bar through its precision astrometric datasets. However, big datasets like Gaia bring a host of challenges, like stellar crowding, which complicate the inference of galaxy structure. I present new, precise measurements of the 2-D geometry of the LMC's bar with Gaia DR3 data using the technique of Fourier decomposition. I present a novel way to extract accurate star counts from crowded regions in Gaia fields, like the LMC's bar. I compare our measurements with tailored hydrodynamic models to discern the origin of the bar's strange properties in context of the SMC's interactions with the LMC. Finally, I draw analogies between the LMC and the general population of barred galaxies in the local universe and highlight implications for bar-galaxy co-evolution.