Rutgers University Astrophysics Colloquium

Understanding the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time requires that we understand the detailed properties of their interstellar gas reservoirs. Observations with radio telescopes can probe the cool phases of these reservoirs, in which hydrogen (the dominant constituent of all interstellar gas) is found in the form of neutral atoms or molecules. Observations with arrays of radio telescopes provide three-dimensional probes of these phases, in which two spatial dimensions are complemented by a spectral dimension that encodes information about line-of-sight motion and cosmological redshift. In this talk, I will present several examples of how we can leverage the large spectral bandwidth and high spectral resolution of radio-wavelength observations to understand the properties of gas in distant galaxies, including in the context of the Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array (LADUMA) survey.