Jessica Werk

The Galactic atmosphere is as essential to setting the global conditions in the Milky Way as our planet’s atmosphere is for sustaining life on Earth. Dramatic, multiphase gas flows course through the disk-halo interface and into the more extended circumgalactic medium (CGM), redistributing the materials generated over billions of years of star formation. In this talk, I will review observational data taken over the last decade from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Keck telescope, and the Gemini telescopes that uniquely constrain the content of the CGM and the nature of these flows around present-day galaxies. Then, I will show new HST data indicating that the Milky Way itself is an outlier among galaxies of similar mass at low redshift. Finally, I will describe an ongoing experiment with HST in which we are using a newly-discovered sample of UV-bright, low-Galactic-latitude quasars to address this Milky Way anomaly.