Dr. Lee Spitler
My research interest is to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies through cosmic times. Galaxies are made up of observable objects (e.g. stars, dust and gas), so they provide an important way to understand the fundamental characteristics of the Universe we live in.
I am currently a member of the z-FourGE team, which is using the FourStar camera on the Magellan Telescope in Chile to obtain near-infrared images of some well-studied locations in the sky. We are using this data to look back into time and measure very accurate distances to galaxies when the Universe was only a few billion years old.
Complementary to this approach is the study of very nearby galaxies, which have already experienced more than 10 billion years of evolution. Our team, called SAGES, is using instruments on the Keck and Subaru telescopes in Hawaii to obtain information about the dynamical properties of galaxies in order to understand the dark matter structures they reside within. Our primary observational target are globular star clusters, which we use to probe the outer regions of galaxies where conventional dynamical tracers are no longer available.
| Phone | +61 3 9214 8891 | |
| Fax | +61 3 9214 8797 | |
| Office | AR 304 | |
| Personal Webpage | http://lee.spitler.googlepages.com/astro |