Together with a team of about 12 international scientists, Brian McNamara’s research focuses on the giant galaxy at the center of the Phoenix cluster – a galaxy that produces stars 300 times faster than the galaxy. “We believe that stars are formed from hydrogen gas that is cooled by the environment, and this is one of the avenues for building giant galaxies,” said McNamara, president of the school’s physics and astronomy department and astrophysics research director. The team will look at neon and hydrogen to understand the heating and cooling of gases that occur in the galaxy, a process that creates stars. Black holes can regulate the way galaxies grow, he said, ejecting some of the hydrogen gas before it falls in, as seen in the Galaxy. “Not all of the gas falls right away, so as it falls, it emits huge amounts of energy, enough to drive the gas to volumes many times the size of the galaxy,” McNamara said. “We are trying to study it.” The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day 2021 and is now at Lagrange or L2. This is a point where the gravitational pull from the earth, moon and sun is zero, McNamara said, making it the perfect place to sit while taking videos from space. “It’s the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope,” McNamara said. “It is designed to look at primitive galaxies – galaxies that formed very early in the universe.” It will also study exoplanets, which could investigate further if human life is possible on planets outside the solar system. For McNamara’s team, the telescope will stare at the Phoenix galaxy for eight hours before infrared information is sent to Earth. They will then be able to analyze the data. “It turns out that the formation of galaxies is a tug-of-war between the oversized black hole in the center and the stars trying to form around it,” he said. “It is a remarkable process that is not understood in detail and that is what we want to know.”
