Speaker
Description
Metals are produced in galaxies as a result of processes associated with the stellar life cycle and will accumulate as galaxies assemble their stellar mass. The metal content of galaxies therefore provides a fossil record of the history of star formation, but also feedback and galaxy-scale gas flows. Measuring chemical abundances in galaxies are thus a powerful tracer of the assembly of stellar mass in the Universe across cosmic time.
However, chemical abundances are challenging to measure accurately. Historically these have largely been limited to galaxies at relatively low redshifts, sampling more recent cosmic history. Meanwhile, constraints have been very limited at early cosmic times when the first stars and galaxies are forming. With the advent of JWST, however, we can now make these measurements out to very large cosmic distances, probing to within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. In this talk I will present the context into which these latest JWST results fit, as well as some of the early findings from chemical abundances studies with JWST.
