Dr. Alberto Bolatto's Research

I am part of the Laboratory for Millimeter-wave Astronomy, and use ground and space facilities to study the effects of heavy element abundance on the physics of the interstellar medium, the relationshp between gas,dust, and star formation in galaxies, and the properties of dark matter galaxy halos in nearby galaxies.


THE CARMA STING
I lead the Survey Toward Infrared-bright Nearby Galaxies (STING), which uses the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) to image molecular gas in a sample of galaxies using the 12CO (J=1?0) transition. The STING galaxies are chosen from the IRAS catalog to uniformly sample the blue sequence of star forming galaxies in stellar mass. STING is a collaboration between co-investigators in all CARMA institutions: Maryland, Illinois, Berkeley, and Caltech.

The Magellanic Clouds
I lead S3MC and S4MC, two surveys of the Small Magellanic Cloud that use the Spitzer Space Telescope to study the Interstellar Medium and the stellar populations in this galaxy. I also participate in SAGE-SMC, a second generation imaging survey of the same galaxy, and HERITAGE, a legacy project proposal to use the Herschel infrared observatory to study the Magellanic Clouds.
Kingfisher
I am part of Key Insights on Nearby Galaxies: a Far Infrared Survey with Herschel (KINGFISHER), a recently proposed legacy project that will perform far infrared imaging and spectroscopy on a sample of galaxies based on the SINGS extragalactic survey. If approved, KINGFISH will measure the cold dust distribution and the emission lines of C+, N+, and O in a representative extragalactic sample.
MIDGes
The Millimeter-wave Interferometric survey of Dwarf Galaxies used the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Interferometer (BIMA) to map the molecular gas distribution in small, nearby galaxies.