How do bulgeless galaxies form?

£4.47M GBP

Funder	Science and Technology Facilities Council
Recipient Organization	Liverpool John Moores University
Country	United Kingdom
Start Date	Mar 31, 2024
End Date	Mar 30, 2027
Duration	1,094 days
Number of Grantees	1
Roles	Principal Investigator
Data Source	UKRI Gateway to Research
Grant ID	`ST/Y002490/1`

Grant Description

Spiral galaxies are made of several components, most notably a stellar disc and also sometimes in the center a bar and a bulge. We call classical bulge a round central component, with stars on randomly distributed orbits. Such round bulges are expected to be the result of mergers with smaller galaxies.

These mergers are predicted to be frequent given our current best cosmological model. However, many nearby galaxies do not host a classical bulge, which can seem surprising.

This projects aims to understand how bulgeless galaxies might form by studying the connection between mergers and bulges from an observational point of view, using deep VLT/MUSE data from the GECKOS survey, a new large programme targeting 35 nearby edge-on galaxies.

We will provide the definitive answer to the question: do bulgeless galaxies have very quiescent merger histories, or do mergers sometimes not create bulges?