A Tour of Dust in Galaxies

Abstract: If I were considering watching a zoom colloquium during a pandemic, I might "forget" to log in if I saw a title coming at me about dust. That said, dust is super important in galaxies....from an ISM perspective, it serves as an important coolant and catalyst for H2 formation. From a stellar light perspective, it's a huge nuisance (but one that has to be dealt with appropriately). That said, we don't yet have a good model for how to deal with it appropriately in either context. I'll present some of our recent work on including dust in cosmological galaxy formation simulations. I'll spend the bulk of the time describing how it impacts our ability to derive physical properties from galaxies via SED fitting techniques, as well as go on a few side-tours of early Universe dusty galaxy formation, dust radiative transfer modeling, and dust attenuation and extinction laws ingalaxies ranging from the Milky Way through early times. And finally, just because all the cool kids are doing it, I'll throw in a few models for how we've coupled these simulations with machine learning techniques in order to both help model dust in other galaxy formation simulations, as well as in SED fitting techniques of observations.