Potential Student Research Projects
I list ideas here for potential student research projects.
While I hope that this is useful to students looking to do some research,
I expect that I will not update this page as frequently as I should.
The upshot is that if you are interested, you should come and talk to me.
- The Tully-Fisher Relation from Spitzer 3.6µ observations (Wesley Peters).
- High redshift clusters of galaxies (Jay Franck).
- High resolution rotation curves (Lei Yang).
- Kinematic analysis of ANGST & LITTLE THINGS dwarf galaxies (Liz Tarantino).
- Constraining Maximal Disks (Nathaniel Starkman).
- Bumps & wiggles: 2D mass model of the Milky Way (Darius Williams).
- Tidal Dwarf Galaxies: do they show a mass discrepancy?
- Local Group dwarfs, esp. in light of Gaia.
- 21cm absorption in the early universe ('cosmic dawn' and the 'dark ages').
- Color-M/L relations of SDSS colors.
- The mass discrepancy-acceleration relation; predicting rotation curves (e.g., S4G).
- Joint analysis of THINGS HI/CO data.
- The Galaxy Assembly Paradox - missing baryons hierarchical galaxy formation - why do massive halos have more baryons than their smaller antecedants?
- Modeling galaxy formation with COMPRESS.
- Testing star formation theories with low surface brightness galaxies.
- Spiral structure in LSB galaxies via image subtraction.
- Analytic/empirical galaxy formation modeling.
- Ellipticity dependence of Local Group dwarfs on environment.
- [Fe/H] in ultrafaint dwarfs via SN blowout.
- Oxygen abundances in low mass, low surface brightness dwarfs.
- Mass modeling from archival data (e.g., 2MASS, S4G).
Spiral structure in the Milky Way (left) as traced by HII regions (pink)
and GMCs (blue). Terminal velocity data (right) suggest that the
Centaurus Spiral Arm is massive enough to perturb the smooth gravitational
potential of the Milky Way.