Abstract
As star formation across the cosmos steadily declines, identifying the processes that suppress galaxy growth has become a fundamental challenge in extragalactic legacy studies. My research focuses on galaxies caught in the act of 'quenching'—the pivotal moment they cease forming stars. Leveraging the multi-wavelength capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and major ground-based facilities, I will present a detailed characterization of the stellar populations, gas flows, and active galactic nuclei in galaxies in this key transformative phase. I will reveal that the rapid transformation must be accompanied by a highly dissipative event that feed the growth of the central stellar component and the supermassive blackhole in the center of galaxies. These findings offer vital benchmarks for galaxy evolution models. This work lays out the path in the coming decade, showcasing how large-area spectroscopic surveys and high-resolution space imaging can converge to reveal the mechanisms driving galaxy evolution in the high-redshift Universe.
Academic bio
Dr. Wu Po-Feng earned his B.S. in physics from National Taiwan University in 2007, M.S. in astrophysics from National Taiwan University in 2010, and Ph.D. in astronomy from University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2016. He then conducted postdoctoral research at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. In 2019, he received the East Asian Core Observatory Association Fellowship and stayed in National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics as a visiting scholar. In 2022, he joined Graduate Institute of Astrophysics in National Taiwan University as an assistant Professor.