Robin Shelton, a professor of physics and astronomy in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, received $135,000 from NASA to develop simulations of high-velocity clouds. These gas clouds, ranging from tiny dots to massive 100,000 light-year-long streamers, are found throughout the universe and provide the material from which new stars form.
Shelton and her collaborators will use high-performance computers to simulate interactions of massive gas clouds and the material within Earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way.
Ultimately, Shelton hopes that their computer simulations and observations through orbiting space telescopes will reveal more about where these clouds come from, how they behave and what role they play in the birth and death of new star systems.