(Extra)galactic Archaeology at Notre Dame
Prof. Evan Kirby
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Notre Dame
Galactic archaeology studies the history of our Galaxy based on the artifacts it left behind. The primary artifacts are the compositions of stars. My group at Notre Dame specializes in extragalactic archaeology, wherein we apply those techniques to external galaxies, especially dwarf galaxies. We use spectroscopy from the Keck telescopes to understand how those dwarf galaxies lived and died and what types of explosions happened in them billions of years ago. We also use spectra from the new `Ōnohi`ula Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope as a large-scale factory for new extragalactic archaeological data.