Shedding light on the invisible cosmic story
The history of the circumgalactic medium is the history of everyone - more than 80% of the atoms in our bodies, on this planet, spent billions of years in this rarefied form. Ultimately, we are trying to make these seemingly impossible connections on the atomic scale to a grand, universal scale.
Most of the normal matter in the universe lives in the vast, dark spaces between its easily visible components - e.g. stars and galaxies. The Werk SQuAD (student quasar absorption diagnosticians) carries out experiments that are sensitive to this hidden material, to test models of how the stars and galaxies evolve. Ultimately, this work helps us to understand our own cosmic origins over the 14-billion year history of the universe.
Our research areas include
The Low-Redshift Circumgalactic Medium
We are surveying the circumgalctic medium of the largest sample of galaxies to date, covering an area more than 5 times the virial radius from potential host galaxies. Ultimately, this new survey will set the standard for the next decade of CGM studies by providing the best constraints on gas cooling times, and mass flow rates into and out of the CGM, both as a function of cosmic time and galaxy properties.
The Disk/Halo Link: Synthesizing Gaseous Tracer Samples in the Milky Way
Our own Milky Way halo is of great interest to us. Luckily, we have high quality data for hundreds of UV sightlines - stars and quasars - which enables a singular opportunity to resolve the hydrodynamics of accretion and outflow in unprecedented detail.
Direct Comparisons with State-of-the-Art Simulations
Recent progress in hydrodynamical modeling has led to increasingly sophisticated treatments of diffuse halo gas that move well beyond the original envisioning of the Galactic fountain where spontaneous radiative instabilities cause clouds to cool and fall back down onto the disk ballistically. We collaborate with many groups running these sophisticated models to better understand the physics driving the gas flows through the circumgalactic medium.
Our Funders
WHY THIS WORK MATTERS
Fingerprints in the data
Diffuse gas in the outskirts of galaxies is a fundamental part of our own cosmic origins story. In essence, the Milky Way’s extended gaseous atmosphere is as important for star and planet formation in the Galaxy as the Earth’s atmosphere is for supporting life on this planet.