Matías Bravo is a Herschel Fellow at McMaster University. His research explores the formation and evolution of galaxies at a population level through a combination of state-of-the-art semi-analytic models and large-scale spectroscopic galaxy surveys, with a special focus on the physical mechanisms regulating star formation at a galaxy scale like environmental processes and AGN feedback. Before joining McMaster, Matías did his PhD at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research node hosted by the University of Western Australia.
Title: A SHARK’s view of galaxy evolution throughout cosmic time.
Abstract: Upcoming extragalactic surveys like the Wide Area Vista Extra-Galactic Survey (4MOST), Legacy Survey of Space and Time (Rubin Observatory), and High Latitude Wide Area Survey (Roman Telescope) will provide global properties for millions to billions of galaxies, challenging theoretical models to produce predictions on a similar scale. Despite the large advances in the last decade, producing millions of physically-motivated galaxies remains outside the predictive capabilities of hydrodynamical simulations. Instead, the capabilities of semi-analytic models are well-matched to produce simulated galaxies in the numbers and with the level of detail that these upcoming surveys will provide. I will present SHARK, a state-of-the-art semi-analytic model designed for easy forward-modelling of observations, highlighting some of our past successes and issues in comparing with observational measurements. I will then describe the recent improvements we have made to address some of the tensions with observations in the latest version of SHARK, v2.0, which includes changes to the treatment of several physical processes like AGN feedback and ram-pressure stripping, expanding the predictive capabilities of SHARK. I will conclude by presenting some of our current work with SHARK v2.0, focused on exploring the evolution of BH/AGN-galaxy scaling relations, the early evolution of massive galaxies, and the timescales of environmental effects on satellite galaxies.