Dr Connor Bottrell

My research focuses on how galaxies are assembled. How do you get a galaxy like the Milky Way from a hot soup of plasma in the early Universe? In particular, I am interested in galaxy collisions. The Milky Way and Andromeda are due to collide in a few billion years. How do such collisions change the physical properties of galaxies? Can galaxies be linked to their collision records? To investigate this, my research uses super-computer simulations in conjunction with observations and machine learning to examine the competition between collisions and external gas inflows in shaping galaxies. State-of-the-art observational facilities like the Square Kilometre Array stand to yield a renaissance in my field by revealing the ecosystem of 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.