Galaxy formation and the oldest stellar systems

现在天体物理学的一个主要领域是了解星系形成的时代：我们今天在宇宙中看到的星系是如何形成和成长的？ 今天怎么样？ 我计划的主要部分是探索附近星系中最古老的恒星群。 这些天体--球状星团和晕场星--是它们的母星系最早起源的可见痕迹。 我的计划将使用成像和光谱学的组合，使用各种望远镜来探测这些恒星群的特征，这些特征是形成过程中最敏感的指标：它们的重元素富集，年龄和空间分布。 与理论家的新合作将并行进行，以生成专门针对星系这些特征的形成模型。

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.