Astronomy Colloquium: Bill Janesh
Date: Wed. September 28th, 2016, 3:00 pm-4:00 pmLocation: Sears 552
Needles in a Haystack: Searching for Optical Counterparts to Ultra-compact High Velocity HI Clouds
Bill Janesh (Indiana University)
Low mass galaxies, and particularly those with recent or active star formation, are excellent laboratories to answer questions about galaxy formation and evolution. Due to their faint nature, however, they are difficult to detect. Ultra-compact High Velocity HI Clouds present an opportunity for a targeted search for resolved stellar populations in reservoirs of cold gas in the Local Volume. The recently discovered low-mass star-forming galaxy Leo P is an example of one such object. We have begun a campaign to obtain deep imaging of a sample of ~50 UCHVCs selected from Arecibo’s ALFALFA HI survey with the aim of detecting or placing constraints on their possible optical counterparts. I will describe our techniques and present initial results from our survey of UCHVCs.