Galaxy Evolution and Globular Clusters
I'm a fifth year graduate student at Lick Observatory, attempting to
understand the evolution of galaxies throughout the history of the
Universe. Other projects include the largest catalog of Galactic
globular-cluster surface-brightness profiles to date.
I'm now in the ultra-competitive postdoctoral researcher job market.
Here's my curriculum vitae in HTML or in PostScript.
Projects and preprints
Click on any of the highlighted titles to see cool pictures from that
work.
In collaboration with S. M. Faber, G. Worthey,
J. J. Gonzalez, and D. Burstein, I am comparing sophisticated models
of galaxy evolution to low-resolution spectroscopy of nearby
elliptical galaxies. These models allow us to derive accurate ages
and metallicities of this important class of galaxies. In fact, we
find that elliptical galaxies may span a much greater range of ages
than previously thought---they may be as young as only a few billion
years, or almost as old as the Universe itself. A preprint is
forthcoming, and will appear here soon.
In collaboration with S. M. Faber, A. Dressler, and the WF/PC 1 IDT, I
am studying the population of galaxies in distant clusters of
galaxies. These galaxies existed when the Universe was only half or a
third of its current age. We are training both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck
Telescope on these clusters to get both ultra-deep,
ultra-high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy in our effort to
understand the evolution of galaxies throughout the history of the
Universe.
All of the pictures on this page are images from the Hubble Space
Telescope. They are galaxies in a cluster seen at a time halfway
back to the Big Bang. Each box is about 175 thousand light-years
across (if you were standing on a galaxy in the cluster), which is
about 1 trillion trillion miles (yes, that's trillion twice), if you
think in those sorts of units. Galaxies are big. But because they're
so far away, they look really small---that's why we need the Space
Telescope. Details like spiral arms, bars, and ring shapes have
never been seen before at such huge distances.
A poster was presented on morphological aspects of this work at the
January 1995 poster.
I. R. King, S. Djorgovski, and I have assembled the largest catalog of
surface-brightness profiles of Galactic globular clusters to date.
The profiles rest heavily on the Berkeley Globular Cluster Survey of
King and Djorgovski. A paper, "A Catalog of Galactic Globular-Cluster
Surface-Brightness Profiles", by S. C. Trager, Ivan R. King, and S.
Djorgovski, is in the January 1995 issue of The Astronomical Journal.
You can get PostScript versions of the text, the published version of Table 1, Table
2, and Figures 2a, 2b, 2c, 2d, 2e, 2f, 2g, 2h, 2i, 2j, 2k, 2l, 2m, 2n, 2o, and 2p. You can also get a poorly-scanned version
of Figure 1. The rest of Table 1 is
available here
in ASCII form, and will also be available on the ApJ/AJ CD-ROM
series.
Oh, and by the way---I use LINUX, too.
Scott C. Trager
UCO/Lick
Observatory
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sctrager@ucolick.org or sctrager@lick.ucsc.edu