Speaker
Kristian Finlator
(New Mexico State University)
Description
Owing in significant measure to hard work by DAWN affiliates, JWST routinely pushes the frontier for detecting hydrogen and metals in emission and absorption to earlier times and lower masses. In parallel, theorists are discovering new physical implications for these observations. Motivated by observations of proximate damped Lyman-alpha absorbers and the galaxy mass-metallicity relation, I will present metal-loading and reionization as two factors whose role was under-appreciated prior to JWST's launch. I then introduce a novel statistical framework for matching metal absorbers to host galaxies that supports a qualitatively new level of realism and complexity as compared to previous efforts.