Dr Connor Bottrell

My research focuses on how galaxies are assembled and what these assembly histories can tell us about the physics of the Universe. How do you end up with the Milky Way and the zoo of other galaxies we see today from a hot soup of plasma in the early Universe? My research focuses on how galaxy collisions drive diversity amongst observed galaxies. This includes collisions like one happening now between the Milky Way and Andromeda, set to coalesce 4 billion years from now. But also, I’m interested in mini-collisions between galaxies and small their small, faint satellites. How do such collisions change the physical properties of galaxies? Can these changes be linked to a deeper understanding of the physics of the Universe?

To answer these questions, my research uses super-computer simulations in conjunction with observations and computer vision to examine how galaxies are affected by collisions of all kinds. State-of-the-art observational facilities like the Square Kilometre Array and Euclid stand to yield a renaissance in my field by revealing the ecosystem of stars and gas in-and-around galaxies in the nearby and distant Universe. Meanwhile, the ability to track individual galaxies backward through time in a simulation offers a window through which a galaxy’s observable properties can be linked to it’s unobservable assembly history.

View my publications on the Astrophysics Data System.