MSCA fellow Iris Breda joined our Department

MSCA fellow Iris Breda joined our Department

Iris Breda won one of the prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowships to carry out her project GALYKOS – Galactic ArchaeoLoGy based on K-band and Optical Spectroscopy at the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Vienna.

This project will offer an unprecedented view of the central regions of spiral galaxies. Its main aims are to break down and differentiate the stellar populations present in these galaxies. Its motivation relies on the fact that the typically adopted model describing the stellar disk of spiral galaxies assumes an exponentially increasing stellar surface density, which has never been established observationally. This assumption has serious implications, severely affecting the assessment of other stellar components which co-inhabit galactic centers. An appropriate characterization of the various central stellar populations will additionally discriminate between different formation scenarios for this galaxy type. When complete, this project will provide clear observational evidence for the shape of the inner disk in galaxies like our own Milky Way, consequently shedding light on the formation of spiral galaxies.

Breda comes to Vienna after being a postdoctoral researcher at Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Spain. Before that she concluded her PhD at Centro de Astrofísica at University of Porto. Her main research interests are observational studies on the formation and evolution of non-interacting galaxies. So far, her work has been focused on the local Universe. In the near future she plans to expand her research to intermediate-to-low redshift galaxies.