The Universe started without the heavy elements that make the complexity of our surrounding world (e.g. carbon, oxygen). In this talk, I will showcase advances in the numerical modelling of how these chemical elements are produced in stars, how they are dispersed around young galaxies by energetic events, and how they get ionized to power the emission and absorption lines we observe in the spectra of distant objects. Leveraging these new prediction capabilities will take us from interpreting the highest-redshift emission lines observable by JWST to the most local chemical abundances of Galactic stars, shedding a new light on how metal-poor stars enriched the Universe in the process.
BIO
I am a galaxy formation theorist focussing on how to interpret data from small dwarf galaxies to constrain interstellar medium physics, stellar evolution and dark matter. I did my PhD at University College London on cosmological structure formation, before diverting to the numerical (dark?) side of galaxy formation during my postdoc at Lund University and as a Beecroft Fellow at the University of Oxford. I recently joined the faculty of the University of Bath as the resident galaxy formation theorist :) Website here for more info: https://martin-rey.github.io/
Host: Cheng Li
