Extra-Disk Starbursts: Star Formation Triggering in Interacting Galaxies

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Date/Time:Friday, 12 Apr 2013 from 4:10 pm to 5:00 pm
Location:Room 3
Contact:Curtis Struck
Phone:515-294-2958
Channel:College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
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Talk by Beverly Smith, Department of Physics and Astronomy, East Tennessee State University

Interacting galaxies exhibit a wide variety of exotic star forming environments that typically are not seen in isolated galaxies. These include beads-on-a-string, hinge clumps, and tidal dwarf galaxies. I will present multi-wavelength images of a set of nearby strongly interacting galaxies, including Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray images, and will compare with both analytical models and numerical simulations of the interactions. I will discuss the role that caustics (narrow pile-up zones caused by orbit-crowding) and swallowtails (intersecting caustics) play in triggering star formation in these systems.