This one-year award will support a dissertation enhancement project of Matthew Fleenor, a student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He will work with Professor Marinus van de Weygaert at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Gronigen and Prof. Melanie Johnston-Hollitt at Leiden Observatory, University of Leiden, both in The Netherlands.
Mr. Fleenor's research will probe the dynamical and morphological characteristics of the Horologium-Reticulum Supercluster (HRS) to evaluate whether the hierarchical merging picture of structure formation accurately predicts the variety and kinematics of substructures present. Mr. Fleenor will benefit from training by experts in related fields: i) the integration of non-optical (particularly radio) observations as a means of interpreting the dynamic and kinematic state of localized regions, and ii) the comparison of the observational datasets with cosmological-scale computer simulations.
