One of the fun things about being an astronomer is being able to stare at pictures of galaxies and claim that you’re doing work. There is a fascinating diversity of galaxy types around us, and one of our challenges is being able to understand how this diversity of forms, shapes, and colors came to be. My research focus has been on early-type galaxies (ellipticals and lenticulars), and especially on reading clues to their evolutionary history from their cold gas. I’ll show some results on the kinematics, metallicity, and isotopic abundance patterns in the gas of early-type galaxies and talk a bit about the implications for our understanding of galaxy evolution.
