Karoline Gilbert
Postdoctoral Scholar
UCO/Lick Observatory
Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

Office: ISB 131

E-mail: kgilbert "at" ucolick.org

Presentations
Publications: HTML PDF
Curriculum Vitae
Useful Links

Stellar Halo Formation: I am part of a team that is investigating the structure, kinematics, and metallicity of the Andromeda Galaxy's newly discovered extended stellar halo. Using the DEIMOS spectrograph on the Keck telescope, we are able to isolate Red Giant Branch stars in Andromeda from dwarf stars in our own galaxy. This allows us to explore the halo of the Andromeda galaxy out to very large radial distances. I am particularly interested in probing the amount and characteristics of substructure in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy, and comparing our observations to what is predicted from simulations of the formation of galactic halos. Please click here for more information on this project. (Advisor: Raja Guha Thakurta)

Supermassive Black Holes: I am also interested in the formation of the central objects of galaxies: supermassive black holes. The discovery of luminous quasars at z~6 has motivated numerous studies of the formation and growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe. Black holes likely grow through a combination of binary black hole mergers and accretion. The angular momentum of a black hole, quantified as its spin, plays a crucial role in determining the efficiency with which a black hole can increase its mass via accretion, and thus has important implications for the growth of supermassive black holes. I am using numerical simulations to explore the effect of different accretion histories and mechanisms on the spin of a black hole. (Advisor: Piero Madau)

Active Galactic Nuclei: As an undergraduate at Ohio State University, I did a Senior Honors Thesis with Dr. Brad Peterson on reverberation mapping of the broad-line region of Active Galactic Nuclei. For more information on this project, click here.