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The
co-evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes Galaxies and black holes seem to have some fundamental link which may go back to the very first galaxies and black holes in the early universe. Much of my research focuses on understanding this symbiotic relationship. How does black hole growth alter the evolutionary trajectory of the galaxies they live in? How do galaxies affect the growth of their central black holes? What exactly were the first black holes, and how did they come into existance? I use a variety of telescopes on the ground and in space to try and figure it all out... |
| Citizen Science: distributed science across the web Citizen science is the direct involvement of members of the public in scientific research. I co-founded the Galaxy Zoo project (galaxyzoo.org) which has involved over 400,000 citizen scientists in classifying nearly 1 million galaxies from the SDSS with each galaxy being classified over 70 times. The citizen science approach allows researchers to use the capacity of the human brain for pattern recognition and for recognizing outliers and multiplies it by linking together hundreds of thousands of volunteers via the internet. By now, we've used the citizen science approach over at the Zooniverse to enlist the public to discover extra-solar planets, archive ancient weather records, peer into the heart of the Milky Way and much, much more. |
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D.Phil thesis
(46 MB)
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(right-click to download)