Amélie Saintonge

UCL physics & astronomy

Professor of Astrophysics

Surveys and Data


xCOLD GASS

xCOLD GASS is a legacy survey from the IRAM-30m telescope which provides the first census of the molecular gas contents across a large, mass-selected galaxy samples (532 SDSS-selected galaxies with 0.01<z<0.05 and stellar masses larger than 109 Msun). The data products of the survey include total molecular gas masses (or deep upper limits) from CO(1-0) observations, additional CO(2-1) fluxes from both IRAM-30m and APEX, HI observations from Arecibo, as well as a broad range of physical properties from SDSS spectroscopy and UV-to-IR photometry.

Key results from the survey include the discovery of systematic variations in star formation efficiency across the local galaxy population, and the demonstration that the availability of atomic and molecular gas, combined with these variations in star formation efficiency, simply explain the distribution of galaxies along and across the main sequence of star-forming galaxies.

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xCOLD GASS shows how the molecular gas contents of galaxies varies both along and across the galaxy main sequence. (Fig. from Saintonge et al. (2017))

JINGLE

JINGLE is a large programme at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), targeting both the gas and dust contents of a large sample of nearby galaxies, allowing us to benchmark relations between the dusty ISM and global galaxy properties, and quantify systematic variations of quantities such as dust temperatures and emissivities across the local galaxy population.

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Variations in dust temperature across the SFR-mass plane for galaxies from the JINGLE and HRS samples. The robust Tdust values come from modeling the spectral energy distributions with a family of Modified Black Body models under a hierarchical Bayesian framework. (Fig. from Lamperti et al. (2019)).