My main interests are in the stellar populations of old galaxies, particularly systems of globular star clusters (GCs). In 2013, I led a paper in which we used the Hubble Space Telescope to to uncover the largest known population of globular clusters, an estimated 160,000, in the massive galaxy cluster, Abell 1689. The detailed mass maps of Abell 1689 determined through gravitational lensing allowed us, for the first time, to compare the population of GCs directly with the dark matter density.
Hubble Uncovers the Largest Known Population of Star Clusters
(NASA News Release, September, 2013)
I am a CAS-CONICYT Postdoctoral Fellow in the PKU Department of Astronomy, and based at the KIAA. My fellowship is sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences South America Center for Astronomy (CASSACA) and the China-Chile Joint Center for Astronomy (CCJCA). I am currently collaborating with Eric Peng at PKU, as well as with Thomas Puzia and Andrés Jordán at Pontificia Universidad Católica, studying globular cluster systems in the nearby Virgo Cluster of galaxies. We are using data from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a Large Program to image the entire Virgo Cluster with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
