In this series of posts, we sit down with a few keynote speakers of the 247th AAS meeting to learn more about them and their research. You can see a full schedule of their talks here and read our other interviews here!
Background
Understanding the interplay between stars, star formation, and the interstellar medium is critical to understanding the evolution of galaxies. One of the best people to talk to if you want to learn about how these factors are connected to the grander scheme of galaxy evolution is Dr. Adam Lero. A professor at the Ohio State University, Adam focuses on using multi-wavelength observations—specifically with facilities like the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the Jansky Very Large Array (VLA)—to understand the interstellar medium, star formation, feedback, and how these relate to the formation and evolution of galaxies. Ahead of his plenary talk, I chatted with Adam to find out more about him, his research, and any advice he might have for younger astronomers in the crowd.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Adam tried out numerous interests, including pursuing literature, before deciding to try out astronomy. “I was like, you know, I’ll stick with this for a while and see where it goes. And now it’s three decades later,” said Adam. He completed his Ph.D at the University of California at Berkeley, and was a Hubble Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) before becoming an Assistant Astronomer there. In 2015, he took up his current position as Professor of Astronomy at OSU. One key factor Adam brought up for this path was how he felt that he was in the right place at the right time throughout his career. “I’ve been super lucky to have people turn on generational or better-than-generational instruments during my career. Before JWST, I was really, really lucky to be a postdoc and on staff at NRAO when they turned on ALMA… even 20 years later it’s still just an order of magnitude better than any other radio telescope.”
Current Research
Adam’s current work focuses on star formation—specficially how it relates to feedback in galaxies—and “is heavily focused on nearby galaxies, which could be anything from the Magellanic clouds, M31, M33, all the way out to 50 mega-parsecs.” “My training is as a radio astronomer and infrared astronomer, and what I’m really interested in is trying to put together all of the wavelengths to study these objects. So I use large surveys or things that contribute to data generation like ALMA, VLA, and JWST.”
One of the key upsides of having a long career in astronomy is seeing how your field evolves and has major breakthroughs. For star formation and the ISM, that is certainly the case, according to Adam. “We had a picture of stellar nurseries and molecular clouds, right? And before ALMA turned on we had the wisdom that these things, like molecular clouds where stars form, they’re kind of like the same everywhere, So this is maybe something where the initial conditions for star formation get locked in the process of forming molecular cloud and they’re all kind of these universal objects,” said Adam, “And one of the things that was really fun when you turn on an instrument 10x more powerful than previously, is you observe molecular clouds and you’re like, oh, no, they’re not at all! So the nurseries were star form vary from place to place across the universe, which is cool and neat.”
When I asked Adam what he was thinking of talking about in his plenary, he said the following: “So the big project that we’ve done over the last sort of 10 years has been this PHANGS survey or collection of surveys, where we combine ALMA with JWST, Hubble, VLT, and essentially any other telescope that we can persuade to point at basically the nearest hundred massive star forming galaxies… We have been very excited about the fact that the JWST images of dust and PAH emission appear to be really, really good tracers of the interstellar medium. From the first day that we’ve had this data, it’s been really clear that the PAH grains are actually giving us just this absolutely beautiful trace of ISM structure and where the gas is. And JWST is a very powerful telescope, so this is a very fun way to complement ALMA as a way to trace the ISM at very high sensitivity and high resolution”.
Advice for Early-Career Astronomers
To round out our interview, I asked Adam whether he had any advice for undergraduates or other early-career astronomers. “Make connections with your peers! They’re who you’ll be working with and collaborating with throughout your career, so it’s important to make sure you build those connections.”
To learn more about simulations of the physics of star formation, be sure to attend Dr. Adam Leroy’s Plenary Lecture: Sharp New Views of the Interstellar Medium of Nearby Galaxies at 8:10 am MST on Wednesday, January 7th at #AAS247!
Edited by: Nathalie Korhonen Cuestas
Featured Image Credit: AAS
