I am an astrophysicst and currently a postdoc at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias located in Tenerife working with Dr. Ignacio Martín-Navarro. My research focusses on galaxy formation and evolution in a cosmological context.
I completed my PhD at the Max-Planck-Insitute for Astronomy (MPIA, Heidelberg, Germany) in the "Galactic Nuclei" research group led by Dr. Nadine Neumayer. I am also closely working together with the "Galaxies and Cosmology Theory" group led by Dr. Annalisa Pillepich. You can find a detailed CV here.
I am interested in how galaxies assemble their stellar mass in a cosmological context. I use spectroscopic observations as well as state-of-the-art cosmolosigcal, hydrodynamical simulations to understand the connection between a galaxy's stellar population properties, like their ages and metallicties, and past merger events.
In my most recent project I constructed realistic SDSS-like mock spectra from the TNG50 simulations to facilitate a fair comparison between theoretical predictions of stellar populations properties of galaxies and those measured from SDSS observations. Preliminary results show that there is a disagreement in the fundamental mass-metallicity relation, which subgrid models used in current cosmological simulations and observational modelling techniques.
I investigated the stellar mass build-up of the central few hundred parsecs of galaxies in the TNG50 simulations. With such simulations, we can track back stars in time and determine where they were born and what properties they have. Stars in the center of galaxies of different origins depending on whether they were born inside the center and remain there throughout their life ("in-situ"), were born somewhere else inside the galaxy and then moved to center ("migrated") or if they were brought in from the merger with other galaxies ("ex-situ"). While in-situ stars are most prominent, interestingly migrated stars make up as much as 40% to the central galaxy mass. Remarkably, ex-situ stars make it to the center of almost every galaxy and can contribute over half of the total mass in a galaxy’s center. Thus, galactic centers serve as a laboratory of diverse formation pathways of galaxies.
I show in my publication that we are able to recover the distributions of ages and metallicities of stellar populations from a single integrated spectrum in agreement with resolved measurements. Whereas the latter is often thought of to be more reliable, it can only be applied to a few nearby stellar systems. Therefore, it is crucial that we develop and test methods that can ultimately provide us with the same information about an object's stellar population content using integrated light alone.
I am interested in disentangling which stars in a galaxy were born from its own gas rescources ("in-situ" origin) and which were brought in by the accretion of other, smaller galaxies ("ex-situ" origin). The in-situ or ex-situ origin of stellar populations inside a galaxy are imprinted on their properties such as their age or metallicity. We can measure such properties from integrated light spectra and recover the mass function of satellites galaxies that completely merged with a galaxy of interest. This is a new observational method, which I developed and tested in my publication. A first appliation of this method to MUSE observations was done in Davison+, incl. Boecker, 2021.
Here you can watch two recorded talks I gave about my research at the "Linking the Galactic and Extragalactic" virtual meeting and the"Tomographic Reconstructions and their Startling Applications" online workshop.
To bring the fascination of astronomy closer to the public I was part of the volantary Outreach Fellows at MPIA, where I did guided tours involving a planetarium show and visits to our in-house telescopes. I was also co-organizing the Girl's Day 2019 as well as a part of the Girl's Day 2021, a workshop to give girls a hands-on feeling for the work of an astronomer and fascinate them for (astro)physics. In 2019 for example, we operated small, remote telescopes to take beautiful pictures of nearby galaxies. They expierenced how we astronomers use filters in different wavelengths to create these colorful images and learn about the physics behind them. The picture to the right of the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) was taken on that day.
