2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Building Galaxies: Some Assembly Required

Investigating how galaxies, the building blocks of our universe, are built is one of the fundamental pursuits of modern astronomy. It is believed that galaxies and their central black holes have been assembled initially via collisions and mergers, gas accretion from the large-scale structure, and then via secular internal processes -- such as bars and spiral arms -- that are seen in the present epoch. Scientists are now making exciting progress on key questions about the detailed history of how disk, elliptical, dwarf, and irregular galaxies -- the Hubble sequence of galaxies -- formed, what the role of the dark matter and dark energy was, and how the first galaxies and black holes that they host formed. Progress is being guided by increasingly sophisticated high-performance computer simulations and by a wealth of data acquired with new centimeter to millimeter wavelength telescopes -- the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, and the Green Bank Telescope -- and by ground- and space-based observatories such as the W.M. Keck Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and others. This symposium brings together leading scientists to present the latest results in this field, as indicated by observations with orders of magnitude better sensitivity, broader wavelength coverage, and significantly increased imaging and spectral resolution compared to the best available just a few years ago.