Abstract :
Progress in optical technology over the past decades has allowed the construction of increasingly powerful integral-field spectrographs, with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert as its current world- leading culmination. The talk will outline this development, with emphasis on applications to the study of nearby galaxies. It will then focus on results obtained for galaxies in the Fornax cluster, which provides a nearby compact laboratory for the study of the detailed internal dynamical structure of galaxies, of the physical properties of their stellar populations, and of the role of the environment in driving their evolution.
Note: The slides of the colloquium are available as a PDF file.
