About My Project

For my senior project, I will be determining the true ages and chemical compositions of star clusters formed in collisions of galaxies by quantitatively correcting for reddening, the effect of obstruction of light of star clusters caused by interstellar dust in collisions of galaxies. The reddening effect is expected to be more severe in ongoing galaxy collisions than in older galaxies. I will be looking at M87, a supergiant elliptical galaxy that merged long time ago and has very little evidence of star formation, and the Antennae Galaxies, a pair of colliding galaxies that are forming stars at a very high rate. This project will use data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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