This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Dr Durrell is a member of a collaboration using the MegaCam wide-field imager on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to make a multicolor survey of 100 square degrees of sky in the Virgo cluster of galaxies. He will use these images to search for globular star clusters between the galaxies, which may originate from material torn off cluster galaxies as they pass close to each other. He will then take spectra of candidate globular clusters with 6-to-10-meter telescopes, to measure their motions and the chemical composition of their stars. This should give clues to the way in which galaxies came together to build the Virgo cluster.
Undergraduate students will be trained as they participate in the research. Dr Durrell is Director of the Ward Beecher Planetarium, and he will develop content for planetarium shows based on this research. He also plans to use a fish-eye camera to create full-dome time-lapse sequences at telescopes during the survey observations. These would be distributed to other groups with full-dome planetarium projectors.
