Data-mining nearby galaxies

Supervisor: Dr. Pauline Barmby

Project Description (Abstract):

Our telescopes are powerful enough to see nearby galaxies not just as fuzzy blobs, but as collections of billions of individual objects: stars, star clusters, nebulae, and more.  Understanding how these objects affect each other and the galaxy as a whole requires combining observations from many telescopes working at different wavelengths, for example the Hubble, Spitzer, Chanda, Canada-France-Hawaii and Gemini telescopes. Projects involving machine learning, hierarchical classification, and comparisons to theoretical models all contribute to building your computational skills while putting together the big picture of nearby galaxies.