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Astronomy Research

Galaxy with MaNGA spectrograph footprint overlaid.
Galaxy image with a the footprint of the multi-object spectrograph MaNGA. UA faculty member Preethi Nair is a participant in the MaNGA collaboration.

Astronomy & Astroparticle Group

The astronomy and astroparticle group consists of ten tenure/tenure-track faculty, one research faculty, and two teaching faculty. The astronomy research group focuses predominantly on extragalactic, stellar, and planetary/exo-planetary astronomy with approximately equal emphasis on theory and observation. The astroparticle research group focuses on the IceCube neutrino observatory and the VERITAS gamma ray observatory. Active research areas include the following:

Faculty Research and Interests

Current Faculty

Dr. Jeremy Bailin is a theoretical and observational astrophysicist investigating the nature of galaxy formation, studying how the nearly uniform Universe that existed after the Big Bang transformed over almost 14 billion years into galaxies like the Milky Way. Dr. Bailin is particularly interested in the structure and history of spiral galaxies, their dark matter, stellar, and gaseous halos, and their satellites — small dwarf galaxies and globular star clusters that orbit far from the galaxy.

Dr. Sam Grunblatt is an observational astronomer specializing in star and exoplanet detection and characterization. He is most interested in understanding how planetary systems evolve across our Galaxy. His research has investigated the inflation and orbital evolution of gas giant planets in the context of stellar evolution, and how the planet populations of subgiant and red giant stars compares to their main sequence precursors. Furthermore, he has characterized photometric observations of stars to precisely measure their masses, radii, and ages and understand the age distribution and evolution of star and planet populations throughout the Galaxy. His projects span late-stage planetary system evolution, asteroseismology, and galactic archaeology. He is also involved in the NASA Kepler and TESS Missions, and is a member of the TESS Follow Up Working Group and TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium.

Dr. Jimmy Irwin uses X-ray satellite observatories to investigate the nature of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and compact stellar remnants (neutron stars and black holes) accreting matter from neighboring stars in binary stellar systems. Current and recent research projects include: (i) identifying high mass concentrations on the galaxy or group scale with gravitational lensing; (ii) searching for evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in globular clusters from the tidal disruption of passing stars in the cluster; (iii) the flow of gas within the Bondi radius of a supermassive black hole.

Dr. Katia Matcheva is a planetary/exoplanetary astronomer whose research centers on characterization of exoplanets using data from large planetary surveys from space or ground observations and numerical simulations from theoretical models. In her work she utilizes a wide range of theoretical, statistical and machine learning tools to extract information about the planet chemical composition and physical parameters from transit spectroscopy. Her recent projects involve developing fast and accurate machine learning models for planetary characterization and population studies, searches for anomalous planets and signatures of life. In parallel Dr. Matcheva uses ML techniques to approach a diverse set of computational problems that arise in theoretical physics and mathematics: exploring the limits of simulation-based inference from large data sets and applying symbolic learning in search of new physics relations. More recently, Dr. Matcheva’s group has explored the use of novel, physics motivated quantum machine learning architectures and quantum algorithms for implementation in a wide range of well-defined science and real-world problems.

Dr. Preethi Nair is an observational astronomer whose research focuses on large surveys to investigate the formation and evolution of galaxies.  Dr. Nair works on characterizing the detailed morphologies of galaxies to determine the growth of structure (bulges, bars, rings, spiral arms) in galaxies and to determine the role of these structures in the mass, metallicity, star formation and AGN triggering histories of galaxies. Dr. Nair is also interested in blackhole occupation fractions in galaxies to constrain SMBH models. Dr. Nair is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-IV and is working with the IFU survey MaNGA which will provide resolved spectroscopy of 10,000 galaxies in the nearby Universe.

Dr. Dean Townsley is a theoretical astrophysicist whose research interests lie in refining stellar physics via its application to novel and dynamic astrophysical systems. More specifically, he studies white dwarf stellar remnants accreting mass from a companion in close stellar binaries. Current research interests include (i) deriving general properties of the compact stellar binary population; (ii) hydrodynamic simulations to study the explosive nuclear events which occur in accreting white dwarf binaries, including surface runaways (Classical Novae) and thermonuclear supernovae (Type Ia).

Dr. Chao-Chin Yang is a theoretical astrophysicist studying how planets were assembled from their natal circumstellar disks to form our Solar System and thousands of extrasolar planetary systems detected in the past couple of decades. He specializes in magneto-hydrodynamics and dust-gas dynamics of circumstellar disks and the formation of kilometer-sized planetary objects such as asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects in the Solar System. His investigation usually involves large-scale computer simulations on high-end computing clusters and the ensuing data analysis.

Affiliated Faculty

Dr. Sergei Gleyzer, an experimental particle physicist working with the CERN CMS experiment. His research interests include pure machine learning and computer science theory of optimization, particularly by automatic feature extraction and breaking down the learning algorithms to their most basic pieces and finding ways to optimize them. His group has applied this work to many astronomy projects including studying dark matter via strong gravitational lensing, exoplanet detection, etc.

Dr. Konstantin Matchev  works in the areas of theoretical high-energy physics, theoretical astrophysics, machine learning, and quantum information science. He is involved in a number of projects in the areas of particle theory and phenomenology, exoplanets, fundamental AI or quantum information science. A primary area of interest is new physics beyond the standard model: model-building, discovery signatures at the Large Hadron Collider, direct and indirect detection of dark matter, Monte Carlo event generation, simulation-based inference, etc. A common theme in Dr. Matchev’s research is the development of new machine learning and quantum computing techniques for the analysis of big data and for novel breakthroughs in symbolic computation and theoretical model building.

Dr. Hunter Waite, is an adjunct professor and research faculty working as a planetary scientist specializing in the application of mass spectrometry to the study of solar system biogeochemistry and aeronomy.

Dr. Murray Silverstone is a teaching faculty in the Department of Physics and Astronomy with expertise in planet formation, specifically with circumstellar disk detection & imaging.

Emeritus Faculty

The following faculty do not supervise graduate students but are involved in the astronomy group at UA.

Dr. Ron Buta’s research concerns the morphology and dynamics of barred and oval disk galaxies. He is particularly interested in the evolution of such galaxies and the role the bar plays in generating structure. For the most part, Professor Buta’s approach has been observational, and he has used data obtained in ultraviolet, optical, near-infrared, and 21-cm radio wave bands for studying galaxies. He has also conducted numerical simulations of several well-observed nearby barred galaxies, using near-infrared images to define the gravitational potential. He has also been involved in the construction of large galaxy catalogues.

Dr. Bill Keel’s research is broadly centered on the evolution of galaxies, including studies of galaxies and groups at high redshifts, ultraviolet studies of nearby galaxies as points of comparison for objects seen at higher redshift and – in collaboration with Professor White – using the backlighting afforded by overlapping galaxy pairs to measure the effects of dust in spiral galaxies. Prof. Keel is a member of the Galaxy Zoo team and is leading follow-up observations of Voorwerp objects which display quasar ionization echoes. He is also the UA coordinator for participation in the SARA observatory consortium.

Dr. Ray White uses X-ray satellite observatories to study the hot atmospheres of elliptical galaxies, as well as galaxy groups and clusters. He uses X-ray spectroscopy to determine the gas temperatures and chemical abundances in these atmospheres, in order to help determine how galaxies and clusters evolve. More specifically, Prof. White uses X-ray observations to determine how much mass galaxies lose to their environment and to constrain theoretical models of supernovae (exploding stars), which enrich the atmospheres of galaxies and galaxy clusters.

Major Astronomy Collaborations and Resources

The astronomy group also uses the high-speed computing facilities of the Alabama Research and Education Network in Huntsville are available.

Astronomy group members are regular users of NASA satellite observatories (Hubble, Chandra, XMM-Newton, GALEX, Swift, Suzaku) and ground-based telescopes worldwide. Research is supported by the NSF and NASA.

Particle Astrophysics

Particle Astrophysics Group

The astroparticle group consists of two research faculty, one teaching faculty, and one visiting faculty.

Faculty Research and Interests

Current Faculty

Dr. Dawn Williams research area is particle astrophysics — using measurements of neutrinos, cosmic rays, and gamma rays from outside the solar system to explore the high energy universe. Dr. Williams is involved in various aspects of calibration of large volume neutrino telescopes. She is a member of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, IceCube-Gen2, and the Radio Neutrino Observatory — Greenland (RNO-G) collaborations. Dr. Williams is the co-convenor of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory calibration working group, the Level 2 Lead for Calibration and Characterization for the IceCube Upgrade project, and the Level 2 Lead for Detector Calibration and Commissioning for IceCube-Gen2.

Dr. Marcos Santander is interested in multimessenger astrophysics, combining observations of high-energy neutrinos and gravitational waves with those collected by gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes to study some of the most powerful objects in the Universe, in particular active galactic nuclei. His group is involved in the IceCube neutrino telescope and the VERITAS gamma-ray telescope array, as well as in the development of two next-generation, ground-based gamma-ray observatories: CTA and SWGO. The group also leads observational programs using space-based instruments such as the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, and the Swift, NICER and NuSTAR X-ray telescopes.

Affiliated Faculty

In addition to the faculty mentioned above, the following faculty contribute to the astroparticle group

Dr. Nobu Okada’s research interests are centered on phenomenological aspects of particle physics, in particular, new physics beyond the Standard Model. It has been clear in recent years that an extension of the Standard Model, i.e. new physics beyond the Standard Model, is needed to explain a number of experimental observations such as dark matter. In addition, the Standard Model suffers from several theoretical problems. These problems are expected to be solved by a certain new physics which is realized most likely at the TeV scale.

Dr. Toale’s research is in the field of particle astrophysics, an area that uses fundamental particles of cosmological origin to study astrophysical phenomena and vice versa. He is interested in understanding the processes that are occurring within and around some of the most extreme objects in the universe, like supernova remnants, active galactic nuclei, and gamma ray bursts. The particles that are most useful for studying these objects include charged particles called cosmic rays, high-energy photons called gamma rays, and neutrinos. Of these, both neutrinos and gamma rays are neutral and therefore are not deflected by the magnetic fields that permeate the universe. Additionally, neutrinos are weakly interacting, meaning they can travel cosmological distances without being absorbed or scattered.

Adjunct Faculty

Dr. Peter Biermann is active in high-energy astrophysics, particularly in theoretical studies of cosmic rays and active galactic nuclei.

Contact Us

If you are a student (undergraduate or graduate) with a possible interest in astronomy or astroparticle physics we would be glad to hear from you via e-mail or otherwise. Please contact one of the physicists above or email physgrad@ua.edu for information about graduate study. Information about our graduate program is also available on our website.