Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are black holes with masses of a few hundred to a few 10^5 solar masses. They could exist in dwarf galaxies and globular clusters if the known scaling relations for supermassive black holes can be extended towards lower black hole masses. In addition, supermassive black holes have also been found in ultra-compact dwarf galaxies, the bigger siblings of...
Feedback from massive stars plays a central role in shaping the evolution of galaxies. Conversely, different galactic environments play a central role in regulating the impact of massive stars. Yet, despite a solid qualitative understanding of feedback, our quantitative knowledge remains poor, and until recently, only a small number of star-forming regions had adequate observational...
With sizes typically below 2 kpc but stellar masses spanning the entire mass range (10$^5$-10$^{11}$M$_{sun}$), the realm of compact galaxies is populated by different families: ultra-compact dwarfs (UCDs), compact ellipticals (cEs) and compact massive galaxies. Although scarce and rare, we need to understand the nature of these tiny galaxies: *what are the mechanisms that created them over...
As part of investigating the astrometric capabilities of MAVIS, we have developed the MAVIS Image Simulator (MAVISIM). MAVISIM was built with the intention to both, predict instrumental capabilities and assess the likelihood of achieving core science cases. In the first iteration of MAVISIM, we used a monochromatic Fourier-based PSF (Agapito et al., 2020) coupled with three realistic...
I will give an overview of MICADO's scientific capabilities and consider the broad potential for synergy with MAVIS.
The evolution of galaxies is closely entwined with their nuclear properties and much attention has focused on the study of the central massive objects (CMOs) which can be constituted of either a supermassive black hole (SBH) or nuclear star cluster (NC). To defi?nitely unveil the link between SBHs and NCs and their origin, it is necessary constraining their masses in a statistically adequate...
Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-timescale events of cosmological origin, with next to no multi-wavelength counterparts identified. The Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) survey has pioneered the localisation of non-repeating FRBs to ~0.1" astrometric precision. The best optical follow-up imaging of their host galaxies is typically no better than 0.5", hindering our...
In recent years, integral-field spectroscopic surveys have revealed that the presence of kinematically-decoupled stellar components is not a rare phenomenon in nearby galaxies. Among the decoupled stellar components, extended large-scale counter-rotation in disk galaxies has been found in a number of objects. The origin of such phenomenon has been demonstrated, at least in some cases, to be...
