by Michael Foley | Jan 5, 2020 | Career Navigation, Current Events
Professor Robert Kennicutt has been at the forefront of research on the star formation rate of galaxies for decade. Come here about his thoughts on the next decade of astronomy research at his talk on Tuesday, January 7th at 3:40 PM at #AAS235!
by Jesse Feddersen | Feb 16, 2016 | Daily Paper Summaries
Red giant stars are bright enough to see at the center of our galaxy, but they are missing. A new study puts stars in a wind tunnel to explore a possible way to dim the lights.
by Elisabeth Newton | Nov 29, 2012 | Daily Paper Summaries
“Galactic archaeology” is the term that has come to refer to using the motions and chemical compositions of stars of different ages to learn about the history of the Milky Way. It seems to me that “galactic paleontology” might be a bit more accurate. I hope to see galactic archaeology v. galactic paleontology fought out in the comments!
by Elizabeth Lovegrove | Jul 31, 2012 | Daily Paper Summaries
In this paper, the SLUGGS team explores an alternate way to determine the metallicity of a globular cluster based on the calcium triplet rather than color. Previous studies have shown what appear to be two peaks in the metallicity of the population of globular clusters surrounding early-type galaxies – a bimodal distribution – but some astronomers have pointed out that the way we measure metallicity in globular clusters can make a unimodal distribution in metallicity appear as a bimodal one. The SLUGGS team recalibrates the calcium triplet relation and surveys 903 clusters around 11 galaxies, and finds a similar bimodal distribution, implying that most massive galaxies undergo at least two star formation episodes.