Claudia Scarlata (U. Minnesota): "On Galaxies' Circumgalactic Media and Outflows"

The gas reservoir around galaxies plays a fundamental, while still poorly understood, role in regulating the growth of galaxies, in establishing the scaling relation we observe among galaxies' physical properties as well as in modulating the escape of ionizing radiation from galaxies, and thus their contribution to the reionization process. Particularly at the low mass end of the mass function, where most of the galaxies reside, the interplay between energy feedback and gas accretion is difficult to model and hard to pin down observationally. In this talk I will present new observational results on the circumgalactic gas of local starburst galaxies. I will place particular emphasis on the uncertainties introduced on the derived physical properties of outflows by different modeling techniques and will briefly discuss how future observations could help mitigate them.