Dr. John O’Meara, Saint Michael's College assistant professor of physics, learned last week that he and five colleagues from around the country have received a $474,617 grant from NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to carry out a study of galaxies and their halos. Professor O’Meara’s portion of the grant is $46,983.
“Our work tries ultimately to answer the question: Where do galaxies get the material they need to form stars?” Dr. O’Meara said.
The official name of the project is “A Comprehensive Study of Highly Ionized Plasma in Galaxies and their Halos at 1.5
The scientists working on the project come from Notre Dame (two individuals), University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of California at San Diego, the European Southern Observatories based in Chile, and Dr. O’Meara of Saint Michael’s College. They will be analyzing data already collected over the last decade through use of the Keck Observatory telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The first half of the study will be to analyze existing data, filling in extra material with trips to Keck as needed, and configuring it in a useable way, Professor O’Meara explained. Formulating the data that already exists is the first step, after that, he said, “we will go after the science.”
Dr. O’Meara earned his doctorate in physics from the University of California, San Diego, in 2004. His dissertation focused on “Cosmology from the High Redshift Intergalactic Medium.” He is an author on 19 refereed journal articles published, mostly, in Astrophysical Journal and Astronomical Journal.