Astrophysics Research

Overview of the Program

Astrophysics is an important part of the New Mexico Tech Physics department. Six faculty members are active in astrophysics research, joined in this effort by undergraduate and graduate students and by adjunct faculty. Connections are strong between the Tech faculty and the scientific staff of the nearby National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Joint research projects are frequent, which gives NMT students a great opportunity to work directly with these world-class instruments. In addition, faculty are engaged in collaborative research at other New Mexico locations (e.g. the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, Cloudcroft Observatory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory), and also in collaborative work with researchers at other national telescopes, space observatories and research facilities.

Current research interests include

• Clusters of galaxies: the distribution of hot gas and dark matter, the role of the magnetic field, and the acceleration of relativistic particles.
• Normal galaxies: their dynamics and evolution and the ecology of their interstellar gas.
• Pulsars: the plasma physics of their strongly magnetized atmospheres and how they produce radio emission.
• Radio instrumentation: designing and developing data acquisition systems to use in making high-time-resolution radio observations of pulsars.
• Radio galaxies: the origins, and plasma dynamics, of radio jets and lobes; and why are some galaxies active and others not?
• Star formation: using radio and X-ray telescopes to study how massive stars are born from the interstellar gas of our galaxy
• Stellar evolution: young stellar objects, mass loss from evolved stars, brown dwarfs, stellar pulsation.
• Optical instrumentation: infrared detectors and optical interferometry

Details of many of these research efforts can be found at the Astrophysics Home Page.

NMT faculty make use of several facilities for their research. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory has its Array Operations Center on the New Mexico Tech campus, which operates the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). The Magdelena Ridge Observatory is under active development and will be situated in the nearby Magdalena mountains. In addition, department faculty and students sometimes work with other optical telescopes (such as Kitt Peak National Observatory), with X-ray satellites (such as CHANDRA), and with other radio telescopes (such as Arecibo Observatory).