THE ART OF MEASURING GALAXY PHYSICAL PROPERTIES

Rationale

Astronomers are making great efforts to achieve ambitious goals: identify sources from the Epoch of Reionization, discriminate between different mechanisms quenching star formation, describe the relationship between galaxies and their hosting halos, unveil the nature of Dark Energy…
A cornerstone in all these studies is the accurate estimate of galaxy redshifts and other physical properties (e.g. stellar mass, star formation history, structural parameters) from spectroscopic and/or photometric data.
In turn, such scientific results will provide a solid physical background to improve the measurement techniques and explore new regions of the parameter space.

Building on a recent CANDELS workshop, this conference will examine key open issues in astrophysics and cosmology, discussing how the most advanced methods, applied to current and future datasets, shall contribute to solve them. To this purpose, we aim at gathering different astronomical communities: not only experts in galaxy measurements, but a diversity of observers and theoreticians whose work can be extremely beneficial to optimally extract information from photometric and spectroscopic surveys.

The conference will address a wide range of questions including:

- How to disentangle the degeneracies still affecting modern fitting techniques? Which are the most elusive galaxies we still haven’t characterized properly?

- What is the true story of galaxy assembly encoded e.g. in the evolution of stellar mass function and star formation main sequence? Is it hidden by observational biases?

- How do black-hole and AGN physical properties connect to the properties of their host galaxies? What are the best ways to select them?

- What does a joint analysis of stellar and nebular emission reveal about the galaxy formation process? Can we combine also information from stellar populations and kinematics?

- What are the much-needed improvements for the future stellar population models? And how much will they change our understanding of galaxy evolution?

- Which priors useful to optical-IR measures can be derived from “distant” wavelengths (i.e. X-ray, Radio, FIR)?

- How will we compare the unprecedented wealth of information from next-generation telescopes and the “big data” coming from cosmological simulations?