Welcome to the website for the Mad Astro Dynamics Research Group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. We study the dynamics of galaxies through simulations, theory, and observations. On this website we have figures and movies from our research, links to publications, and biographies of our members.
News of the Month
Lekshmi's recent work showcasing the evidence for a vertical kinematic oscillation in the Galactic disk is now accepted for publication in Astronomy \& Astrophysics Letters. This work constrains the kinematics of the Radcliffe Wave using young stars and open clusters as tracers and studies the vertical velocity trends of young stars beyond this region. She discovers a kinematic wave in the Galaxy, distinct from the warp, with the amplitude of oscillation depending on the age of the stellar population. By doing a similar analysis in a N-body simulation of a satellite as massive as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy impacting the galactic disk, the paper proposes a possible origin for this bending mode. ArXiv pre-print available here: 2112.08390
Additionally, Scott has received the Duncombe Prize for the 53rd Meeting of the Division of Dynamical Astronomy to be held April 2022, and Elena has received a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) grant to build a prototype of the CREW HaT system for shielding astronauts from harmful radiation.
Close Collaborators
| Alfonso Aguerri | IAC, Spain |
| João Alves | University of Vienna, Austria |
| Gus Beane | Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA |
| Bob Benjamin | UW - Whitewater, WI, USA |
| Ron Drimmel | INAF, Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, Italy |
| Carrie Filion | Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, MD, USA |
| Andy Fox | Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA |
| Jay Gallagher | UW - Madison, WI, USA |
| Lars Hernquist | Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA |
| Eloisa Poggio | Observatoire de Nice, France |
| Bart Wakker | UW - Madison, WI, USA |
| Ellen Zweibel | UW - Madison, WI, USA |
Research Funding Sources
