Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
The Interstellar Medium of the Most Luminous, Dusty Galaxies, Near and Far
Tanio Diaz-Santos (FORTH, Institute of Astrophysics, Greece)
Thursday 10/04/2025 @ 11:30, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
Most galaxies in the universe spend their lives inhabiting what is called the main-sequence of star-forming galaxies --a relatively peaceful state in which galaxies form stars and feed their central massive black holes in a steady manner. However, both simulations and observations suggest that, at least once during their life-times, galaxies undergo a major merger event that drastically increases their star formation efficiencies and black hole accretion rates over a short period of time. This transformative phase is fundamental to our understanding of the main physical processes that drive the interstellar medium properties of galaxies over cosmic time. Yet, this transformation occurs behind a thick blanket of gas and dust that obscures the very luminous, central power source(s), making them detectable only in the infrared. In this talk I will present results obtained from recent observations of nearby and high-redshift luminous, dusty galaxies, for which in-depth studies of their interstellar medium have been only made possible by the advent of state-of-the-art infrared and sub-mm facilities such as JWST and ALMA.