Powerful winds from young stars and their violent deaths as supernovae play a dramatic role in the evolution of galaxies across cosmic time. But the galaxies that existed 10 billion years ago formed stars hundreds of times faster than the galaxies that exist today. In order to understand the fiery history of galaxies like our Milky Way, astronomers must exploit gravitational lensing—naturally occurring cosmic magnifying glasses—to evade the physical laws that limit the resolving power of telescopes. Dr. Chelsea Sharon is an observational radio astronomer and she studies the processes that affect star formation and galaxy evolution across cosmic time. For her work, she primarily uses synchronized arrays of radio telescopes like the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico (USA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile to characterize the gas reservoirs that fuel star formation. Her work addresses why galaxies in the early universe have unusually high star formation rates and what role galaxies’ supermassive black holes play in ending periods of rapid star formation.
Dr. Sharon received her BS in astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology in 2007, and her PhD at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 2013. Dr. Sharon was subsequently a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell University as well as the inaugural William & Caroline Herschel Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University prior to joining the faculty at Yale-NUS College. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at [ Ссылка ]
