Directory
Jessica Werk
Contact Information
studying at Columbia University 500 Church St. Ann Arbor, Mi 48109 Department Phone: (734) 764-3440 Fax: (734) 763-6317Email: jwerk (append "@umich.edu" to send email)
Research Statement:
In massive galaxies like the Milky Way, stars form by a wide variety of well-studied and complex processes involving gravity, magnetism, chemistry, and hydrodynamics. Recent detections of star formation in the intracluster and intergalactic medium offer the rare opportunity to study newly born stars in an environment vastly different from that of the galactic disk. The absence of rotation, spiral density waves, and high-density gas in intergalactic space challenges our current paradigm of how stars form.
I have compiled a sample of intergalactic HII regions, tiny pockets of ionized gas up to 60 kpc from the nearest galaxy, using the available scientific literature, the Survey for Ionization in Neutral Gas Galaxies (SINGG; Meurer et al., 2006, ApJS, 165, 307), and a catalog of galaxies having extended or disturbed neutral gas distributions (The HI Rogues Catalog; Hibbard, J.E. et al., 2001, in ASP Conf. Ser. 240, Gas & Galaxy Evolution, eds. J.E. Hibbard, M.P. Rupen, & J.H. van Gorkom, ASP, San Francisco, 659). From metallicity determinations to high-resolution imaging to millimeter observations, I intend to study this sample extensively. Some of the questions I hope to address are:
- How common is this form of star formation in the local universe? in interacting systems?
- How is star formation triggered outside of massive gas disks?
- Are the stellar populations of the intergalactic HII regions consistent with those of young, Galactic star clusters?
- Given the frequency of intergalactic HII regions in interacting systems, and the higher frequency of interactions at large redshifts, for how much of the metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium are these sorts of objects responsible?
- What is the evolutionary fate of the intergalactic HII regions? Will they fade and die out, or will they be able to draw from a nearby gas reservoir and form into a larger stellar system?
