Speaker: Patricia Schady (Bath)

Date: Thursday 19 October 2023

Time: 14:00

Location: Ada Lovelace Building SM2

Tracing the enrichment of the Universe with Gamma Ray Bursts

Tracing the chemical enrichment of our Universe, not only internally within a galaxy, but also through cosmic time, is a powerful diagnostic of the principal processes driving stellar and galaxy evolution. With the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Christmas day 2021, we are now significantly extending our reach of the observable Universe to just 1 Gyr after the Big Bang. However, even with JWST, are observations remain biased towards the most luminous and star forming galaxies, skewing our view of the chemical enrichment of the Universe to the <20% of baryons that reside within star forming regions at z>2. An alternative, sensitive probe of the chemical enrichment of galaxies is through the detection in absorption of prominent hydrogen and heaver element lines on the spectra of luminous, background quasi-stellar objects (QSOs), and more recently also gamma ray bursts (GRBs). In this talk I will summarise the power of using GRBs to study the enrichment of distant galaxies, and show recent results from a cycle-1 program of the first GRB host galaxy emission spectra taken with JWST, offering a first glimpse at the relation between the chemical enrichment the interstellar neutral gas and gas in star forming regions as probed through emission and absorption line studies.