Spheroidal Post Merger Systems at the AAS

I think Chris said it best – any session which is ended by a guy in a bowtie went well. And for our AAS Galaxy Zoo session, that guy in a bowtie was Alfredo Carpineti from UCL, who talked about his work on the properties of spheroidal post-merger systems selected with the help of the Galaxy Zoo merger classifications, and using a control sample of non-merging spheroidals (or ellipticals) also selected from Galaxy Zoo.

Alfredo provided me with the below description, and his slides are available to download at Carpineti_AAS218talk.pdf.

In this talk we discuss the properties subset of galaxies from the GZ mergers catalogue that are spheroidal ‘post-mergers’, where a single remnant is in the final stages of relaxation after the collision and shows evidence for a dominant bulge, making them plausible progenitors of early-type galaxies.