Abstract: How do stars form? What fuels galaxies? And what makes our own Milky Way just one among billions? To answer these questions, astronomers look not only at distant galaxies across the universe but also turn their gaze much closer to home.
We’ll explore how scientists use the world’s most powerful telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Very Large Array (VLA), and the MeerKAT radio telescope and also satellites like GALEX, WISE or James Web to observe galaxies in our cosmic neighborhood. These nearby galaxies serve as laboratories, where we can zoom in to study the cold gas that forms stars, the dust that hides young stellar nurseries, and the energetic feedback from dying stars.
I’ll take you on a visual journey through stunning observations, explain what galaxies are made of, and how how modern astronomy lets us peer into their past and predict their future. Along the way, we’ll see how understanding nearby galaxies helps us answer one of the biggest questions in science: how galaxies like our own evolve, form stars, and shape the universe around them.
