Elizabeth McGrath, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy (Colby)
The night sky is filled with stars and galaxies whose light was emitted at different times throughout the entire 13.6 billion year history of the Universe. Each one provides us with a snapshot in time, which we can use collectively to gain insight into some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe. When did the first stars and galaxies form? How do galaxies and their stars evolve with time? What causes galaxies to stop forming stars and die? The answers to these questions will help us understand our own Milky Way galaxy’s past, present, and future, including the fate of the stars and planets within it. In this talk, I will discuss what images from the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing about the early history of galaxies, and how our current theories of galaxy formation and evolution may need to be modified to properly account for recent observational results.
Elizabeth McGrath is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Colby College. She obtained her Ph.D. in 2007 from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. After leaving Hawaii, she was a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she worked on designing new adaptive optics technologies to improve the image quality of ground-based telescopes. McGrath is a leader in the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), which is the largest sky imaging survey ever carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope. Her current research focuses on how the most massive galaxies form and what processes are responsible for shutting down their star-formation. She is an outdoor enthusiast, and spends much of her free time hiking, backpacking, and kayaking around Maine and other parts of the country.
- Intangible Knowledge of Far-Away Existence May 13, 2019
Kallie Hutchinson Elizabeth J McGrath’s talk titled, “Using Distant Galaxies as Cosmic Time Machines”, provided an area of scientific research and discovery that I personally have absolutely zero background in. In reflection ... - Space Study: An Entirely Different World May 13, 2019
William Kirby Professor McGrath’s lecture on the depths of space was completely fascinating and entirely captivating. She immediately jumped into the exciting world of space on her first slide; the background photo ... - Looking at the Past in the Present May 7, 2019
slattia Elizabeth J McGrath’s presentation last night of “Using Distant Galaxies as Cosmic Time Machines” was very interesting, especially as a student who has never studied astronomy or physics. She began ... - Staring at the Stars – A Conclusion May 7, 2019
egrubman This week’s lecture in the series, Presence of the Past was fitting as it culminated a semester of interdisciplinary lecture with a topic that we had not yet thought about: ...