The European VLBI Network (EVN) is pleased to announce a series of online seminars “The sharpest view of the radio Universe: VLBI – Connecting Astronomers Worldwide”. Seven speakers will cover 7 different science topics, and the talks will occur roughly every 7 weeks between early July 2020 and the EVN Symposium, which has been rescheduled to July 12-16, 2021. These talks will illustrate how Very Long Baseline Interferometry can improve our understanding of many astronomical phenomena, from stars to galaxies, and the talks are aimed at a broad astronomical audience.
Full information about the webinars, which will be run using Zoom, can be found at https://www.evlbi.org/evn-seminars.
The first seminar will take place on Wednesday 8 July 2020, 10:30 CEST. Our speaker, Cristiana Spingola (University of Bologna) will talk about “Using Strong Gravitational Lensing to Zoom in on High-Redshift Galaxies”.
The talks will be 35-40 min long, followed by a Q&A and discussion session. Attendants can join via Zoom following this link (Meeting ID: 977 9168 7969). The talk will also be streamed in real time via YouTube (it will appear at the JIVE and EVN channel in due time). Participants will be deferred to the YouTube channel after reaching the limit of 100 people on the Zoom session.
Please feel distribute this invitation to any mailing list, colleague, or scientist that you feel may be interested.
Title & abstract:
Using Strong Gravitational Lensing to Zoom in on High-Redshift Galaxies
The centres of galaxies are powerful laboratories to test models of galaxy formation, as well as the interplay between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. While these sub-galactic scales can be directly investigated in the local Universe, it is observationally extremely difficult to access them at high redshift. In this talk, we will exploit the combination of strong gravitational lensing and multi-wavelength high angular resolution observations to directly study the parsec scale emission in active galaxies at z > 1. The magnifying effect of strong lensing and the milliarcsecond angular resolution of HST, Keck AO and VLBI observations allow us to spatially resolve the central parts of distant lensed galaxies, especially if they are located in the regions at highest magnification. Therefore, it becomes possible to unveil dual and offset AGN candidates, but also faint extended jets embedded in massive molecular gas reservoirs at cosmological distances. Nevertheless, this kind of study is currently limited by the small number of radio-loud lensed sources. We will conclude by discussing the current efforts to search for more lensing systems in wide-field VLBI surveys.
On behalf of the EVN Seminars Organizing Committee,
the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC and the University College Cork,
Denise Gabuzda (University College Cork)
Benito Marcote (Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC)
Anna Bartkiewicz (Torun Institute of Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University)
Marcello Giroletti (INAF Instituto di Radioastronomia)
Miguel Pérez-Torres (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía)