TUNA Lunch Talk:

D. J. Pisano

West Virginia University

Tracing the flow of gas onto galaxies with the Green Bank Telescope

June 4

12:10PM, Room 230, NRAO, Edgemont Road

Abstract:

One of the key questions in astronomy today is how galaxies accrete their gas and then convert that gas into stars. The HI Nearby Galaxies Survey (THINGS), conducted with the VLA, has made great strides towards answering these questions, but it lacked sensitivity to the extended, diffuse HI in and around galaxies. To rectify this problem, my collaborators and I have recently completed a Green Bank Telescope (GBT) HI survey of the THINGS galaxies. The GBT's clean beam, low system temperature and good angular resolution make it the ideal single-dish telescope for observing low column density HI. Our survey was capable of detecting HI emission from analogs to Lyman limit systems, provided it fills the GBT beam. I will present the first results from our search for low column density tidal features and infall from the ``cosmic web", and I will detail my future plans.