On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Claire Kopenhafer.
The Hubble Space Telescope has given us many gorgeous images of galaxies, with bright stars and swirls of dust, but there’s a lot more going on than we can easily see. Stars are born out of compressed gas, and gas is constantly flowing in and out of galaxies. Most of this gas cannot be seen in Hubble’s pictures, but its impact is profound. Claire uses computer simulations to study how this flow of gas affects a galaxy’s ability to form stars: allowing it to form more, or cutting it off entirely. These simulations use what we understand about the laws of physics to make predictions and interpretations for telescope observations.

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