Syeda Lammim Ahad started as a WCA Postdoctoral Fellow in December 2023. She completed her PhD in Astrophysics from Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands, in November 2023, where she studied galaxy groups and clusters and galaxy evolution within these systems by detailed comparison of cosmological hydrodynamic simulations with recent observational data. She obtained her MSc in Astronomy and Astrophysics from the AstroMundus program as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar in 2018 from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her MSc thesis was on studying the nucleated dwarf galaxies from the MATLAS survey. Lammim's research interests include galaxy evolution and quenching in different environments, growth of mass and light in galaxy clusters, intragroup and intracluster light, and galaxy-halo connection. Outside research, she actively contributes to science outreach and cares about promoting EDI and sustainable practices
Title: The measurement and interpretation of intragroup light: combining simulations and observations
Abstract: The diffuse light in groups and clusters, also known as the intragroup/intracluster light (IGL/ICL), is an excellent probe to understand the growth of the brightest cluster galaxies (BCG) and their host systems. Studying the IGL is particularly interesting for the complementary halo mass range that groups cover between galaxy-mass haloes and massive clusters. However, this potential has not been fully exploited so far due to a number of challenges. One major challenge is the unambiguous detection of the group center of potential based on photometry. Another is the physical interpretation of the stacked ICL profile due to any possible dependency of the ICL fraction on the host systems. We explore these challenges using mock observations of 511 galaxy groups and clusters from the Hydrangea cosmological hydrodynamic simulation suite. I will present our findings from this work and how we used these results to analyze the IGL from deep r-band imaging data of ~1000 GAMA groups from the KiloDegree Survey.