›Crossing the Rubicon - The Fate of Gas Flows in Galaxies

Galaxies perpetually exchange material with the surrounding environment. This exchange takes the form of inflows and outflows of gas occurring at very different scales both locally and globally. Gas infall from the intergalactic medium is required to feed star formation in galaxies today and progressively more at early times. Moreover, accretion onto the centers of galaxies provides fresh material to feed supermassive black holes and central starbursts. On the other hand, both stellar feedback and black hole feedback produce gas outflows from galaxies and galaxy centers into the surrounding medium, polluting it with metals and depleting galaxies of baryons. This can provide a solution to the missing baryon problem.

In recent years, much progress has been achieved both from the observational and the theoretical/numerical point of view. This conference aims to bring together the expertise from around the world on gas flows in and out of galaxies at very different scales, from sub-parsec (including AGN accretion winds) to megaparsec scales (including the circumgalactic medium) and discuss the recent progress in this field. We give particular emphasis to the fate of gas that is inflowing and outflowing from galaxies, is there a Rubicon for galaxies and black holes that irreversibly affects their subsequent evolution? We will discuss all this near the historic Rubicon river.