We will be at the Roper Mountain Science Center for this meeting.
Coming to us from the UK, please welcome Dr. Chiara Spiniello of the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Spiniello has been featured in many recent articles about the discovery of "Fossil Galaxies", which are frozen in time. Here's one of those articles from Space.com
https://www.space.com/astronomy/exoplanets/astronomers-discover-a-galaxy-frozen-in-time-for-billions-of-years-fossil-galaxies-are-like-the-dinosaurs-of-the-universe
TOPIC
Cosmic archaeology with galactic fossils: relic galaxies as building blocks of giant ellipticals
Since the late 18th century, stargazers have noticed small, fuzzy patches of light in the night sky, calling them nebulae, from the Latin word for “clouds.” The philosopher Immanuel Kant speculated that these nebulae might be entire “island universes”: star systems beyond our own Milky Way. This bold idea remained controversial for more than a century, until Edwin Hubble, in the 1920s, used new telescopes and precise measurements to prove that at least one of these nebulae lay far beyond our Galaxy, hence forever changing our view of the cosmos.
Today, we define a galaxy as a gravitationally bound collection of stars, gas, and dust. Thanks to modern telescopes, we can see a dazzling variety of galaxies in the night sky, in different colors, sizes, and shapes. Among them, giant elliptical galaxies stand out: they are the most massive and oldest systems, holding more than half of the universe’s stars and playing a crucial role in its chemical enrichment.
But how did they grow so large, and how did their stars become so ancient?
To explore this mystery, I will introduce a rare and remarkable class of objects known as relic galaxies: ultra-compact “fossils” from the dawn of the universe. Formed in the earliest cosmic epochs, relics are extraordinary because they evolved passively and untouched, without colliding or merging with other galaxies and without forming new stars, remaining frozen in time for billions of years.
They are the building blocks of today’s giant ellipticals, and at the same time frozen snapshots of the ancient universe. By studying these relics, astronomers become cosmic archaeologists: uncovering how the first massive galaxies assembled, how their structures formed, and how they seeded the universe with the heavy elements that later generations of stars, including our own Sun, inherit.
Join me for this journey across space and time, from nebulae to galactic fossils, as we explore what relic galaxies reveal about the early universe.
BIO
Chiara’s fascination with the cosmos began at the age of three, when she told her family that she would one day count all the stars in the sky. She grew up and studied in Naples, Italy, earning her Bachelor’s degree in Physics and her Master’s degree in Astrophysics and Space Science at the University of Naples “Federico II.” She completed her PhD cum laude at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, then held an Independent Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, followed by a European Marie Skłodowska-Curie Astrofit2 Fellowship at the INAF – Astronomical Observatory in Naples, Italy.
Since 2020, Chiara has been at the University of Oxford, and at Christ Church college where she tutors undergraduates in mathematics and general relativity.
In 2024, she was awarded the prestigious UK STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship to establish her own independent research program.
In 2026, she will join the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Headquarters in Garching as Group Head Astronomer.