Galaxy formation and the oldest stellar systems

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

One of the dominant areas of astrophysics now is to understand the era of galaxy formation: how did the galaxies that we see in the universe around us today form and grow? How is it continuing today? The major part of my program is aimed at exploring the very oldest stellar populations in nearby galaxies. These objects -- the globular clusters and halo field stars -- are the visible traces of the very earliest beginnings of their parent galaxies. My program will use a combination of imaging and spectroscopy with a wide range of telescopes to probe features of these stellar populations that are the most sensitive indicators of the formation process: their heavy-element enrichments, ages, and spatial distributions. New collaborations with theoreticians will run in parallel to generate formation models specially tuned to these features of galaxies.