Mr Jamie McGregor

I am a first-year Masters student at ICRAR-UWA, and I am currently working on a project using the new MAUVE survey. The survey looks at galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster, which are all close enough to each other to interact and have significant effects on each other’s evolution. MAUVE uses an integral field spectrograph, which means that for each galaxy we get thousands of high-resolution images, each at a slightly different wavelength – we can use this to work out which atoms and ions are in the galaxy, which direction parts of the galaxy are moving, and how new stars are being born!

In particular, I am looking at quenching in these galaxies – the extreme environments in clusters like Virgo tend to stop galaxies from forming stars. My project involves trying to work backwards and piece together exactly how star formation is stopped, when in a cluster galaxy’s life this occurred, and which parts of a galaxy tend to quench first. Trying to work out what a galaxy was doing millions of years ago is something of a dark art, but it’s a lot of fun and I get to work with some amazing images!

Prior to my Masters, I completed an Honours in Mathematics and Statistics, where I used network science techniques to analyse and classify classical music. I have also completed summer projects at ICRAR-Curtin and OzGrav’s UWA node.