Por Ciro Pappalardo (Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço, FCUL).

Astrophysics is experiencing a period of great excitement: the advent of new facilities and the ongoing construction of new instruments will revolutionise our view of the Universe. In this talk, I will present the effort of our team to understand the physical properties and the evolution of the interstellar medium (ISM), the cradle where stars form, grow and die. Our results show that there has been a constant evolution in the ISM in the last 3 billion years, with a decrease in the number of free electrons in the ISM and in the number of photons available for ionisation. That is crucial because the reduced star formation observed in the last 10 billion years is strongly affected by the properties of the gas where stars form.

Short bio: Ciro Pappalardo, a native of Sicily, got his Master's in Astronomy at the University of Bologna and his PhD in France at the University of Strasbourg. After a brief 'Italian saudade' period in Florence, he moved to Lisbon, where he is currently an assistant researcher at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. His main interest is galaxy evolution in all its form.