First Light And Reionisation Epoch featuring Aswin Vijayan (University of Sussex)

Hosted by: Rob Yates (University of Surrey)

In this talk I will walk you through some of the open questions in the galaxy formation and evolution in the first billion years, which can be roughly termed the First Light And Reionisation Epoch. I will discuss how simulations of galaxy formation and evolution are a great avenue to interpret the current observational data. In particular I will focus on a suite of simulations that I work with, termed the First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES), that have been designed to produce a statistical sample of high-redshift galaxies, that will be accessible to current and next generation telescopes like Euclid, JWST or Roman. I will talk about how we forward model our simulated galaxies into the observed space allowing us to work as close as possible to the observations. I will briefly talk about the successes and drawbacks of the simulation with respect to the latest data from JWST.  I will then shift my focus on how the presence of dust complicates the interpretation of emission line spectra that are used to understand the nature of the ISM in these high-redshift systems, now accessible due to JWST.