Galaxies 09: Assembly, Gas Content and Star Formation History of Galaxies
Dennis Zaritsky
University of Arizona
Implications and Applications of the Fundamental Manifold
How many parameters are necessary to describe galactic structure? What is the connection of those parameters to physically meaningful quantities? I will describe our methodology for determining the dimensionality of galactic structure and demonstrate that all stellar systems form a nearly a 2-dimensional manifold in a 3-dimensional parameter space. This construct contains the well-known special cases (Tully-Fisher and Fundamental Plane) but has the distinct advantage of describing galaxies of all luminosities and morphological type with a single relationship. I will then discuss extensions of
this formalism to constrain the star formation efficiency of galaxies, the range of baryon concentrations, and test stellar population models.
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