Cosmology seminar: Intrinsic galaxy alignments and connection to cosmology and galaxy evolution

The orientations of galaxies in the universe do not follow a random distribution but they are set by the gravitational field and are affected by galaxy evolution processes. Because of this, these intrinsic galaxy alignments produce shape correlations that can bias results obtained from probes based on such correlations e.g., cosmological parameter estimation from weak gravitational lensing. At the same time, the intrinsic galaxy alignment signal can help us better understand galaxy evolution and also contains cosmological information. In this talk, I will discuss what we currently know about the dependence of the intrinsic alignment signal on several galaxy properties and how one might use this information to improve modelling, learn more about galaxy evolution and extract cosmological information.