Modern astronomers are like librarians. In the era of the big observatories and large surveys astronomers must handle gigantic data-sets, and they have to face the challenging task of merging all the data before being able to study the properties of stars and galaxies. To improve this situation, the community has devoted a considerable effort…Continue Reading An Interactive Web-Database for Galaxy Surveys
Exploring the Nature and Origin of Dwarf Elliptical Nuclei
Overall Description / Broad Science Goal:The goal of this project is to learn about the origin of the bright nuclei observed at the centers of dwarf elliptical galaxies (dEs) in the Virgo Cluster. One theory for the formation of dE nuclei suggests that these nuclei are effectively “super star clusters” formed by the coalescence of…Continue Reading Exploring the Nature and Origin of Dwarf Elliptical Nuclei
The Discovery of Thousands of Extrasolar Planets: Quantifying the Human Element
NASA’s Kepler Mission is a search for Earth-sized planets in Earth-like orbits around Sun-like stars. This discovery is not all the mission aims to accomplish, however: one of its most important goals is to measure how frequently planets of different sizes occur around other stars, referred to as the “planetary occurrence rate”. To this end,…Continue Reading The Discovery of Thousands of Extrasolar Planets: Quantifying the Human Element
Tomography of Sources Detected in the Next Generation Virgo Survey: Substructure in the Milky Way and Background Galaxies
Overall Description / Broad Science Goal:The Virgo cluster is our nearest rich collection of galaxies. The properties of the cluster are being studied in great detail by many different groups of astronomers around the world. The project mentors are member of the premier Next Generation Virgo Survey (NGVS) team. When attempting to study this cluster,…Continue Reading Tomography of Sources Detected in the Next Generation Virgo Survey: Substructure in the Milky Way and Background Galaxies