Adam Ginsburg
University of Florida, FL·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Stars and planets form together inside clouds of cold gas. Astronomers still cannot predict where stars will form, how large they will grow, or which planets they will end up with.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
star formation
massive stars
protostars
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Measure how fast and how much gas flows from parsec-scale clouds into ~1000 AU cores across 259 star-forming clumps in the ALMA Panta Rei survey, using dense-gas and infall/outflow molecular tracers.
- Test whether cores always separate dynamically from their parent clumps, and how clump motions affect core formation, by linking Panta Rei data with high-resolution DIHCA, MAGMAR and HIPPOS observations.
- Measure the dynamical masses of High Mass Young Stellar Objects (HMYSOs) from the rotation of their disks, traced by NaCl and KCl salt emission lines in ALMA data.
- Determine whether massive stars grow by disk accretion, mergers or inflow-driven instabilities, by surveying nearby lower-mass protostars with dust maps and NH3 and CH3CN temperature measurements.
More about the research
This research follows how gas moves from large clouds into individual young stars, and how the most massive stars gain their mass. Both projects rely on the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a radio telescope array that detects light from cold gas and dust.
Why it matters
This is basic research into how stars and planetary systems are assembled. It aims to explain how gas feeds young stars and how the most massive stars gain their mass. Because massive stars control much of a galaxy's energy budget and create heavy elements needed for rocky planets, the results could inform models of galaxy evolution. They could also inform theories of the stellar initial mass function, the distribution of masses that stars are born with.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Bally
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Map molecular gas across the entire Milky Way Central Molecular Zone at high resolution with the ALMA telescope as part of the ACES survey, tracing gas motions with more than a dozen molecular tracers.
Jonathan Williams
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure carbon monoxide in the inner, terrestrial planet-forming region of young disks (within about 5 au) using infrared spectroscopy from the Keck Observatory and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility.
Alanna Hughes
Wesleyan University, CT·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Improve methods for analyzing centimeter-wavelength (microwave) continuum emission from protoplanetary disks, focusing on VLA observations.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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