Research Interests

Determining the star formation histories (SFHs) of dwarf galaxies based solely/primarily on their CARDs

Critical to the idea of stellar/Galactic archeology (or perhaps more precisely Galactic genealogy^TM), is the fact that stars retain en masse the inherited chemical enrichment from the ancestral populations. This means that the "precise" SFHs of dwarf galaxies is, in principle, encoded in the CARDs of each dwarf galaxy. Moreover, nearby dwarf galaxies can soon be observed deeply enough to recover their CARDs. Either "sophisticated" hydrodynamic GCE codes or "clever" statistical SAMs will provide the means to decode the SFHs of these systems with precision not currently available to traditional methods. CARD-generating dwarf galaxy models that can reliably extract SFHs from dwarf galaxies like Fornax or Hercules would essentially "close the loop" in determining the galactic evolution of dwarf galaxies.

One core aim of my research is to develop CARD-tracking semi-analytic models (SAM) to recover high fidelity SFHs of dwarf galaxies.

More details to come.

Duane M. Lee