Michael Balogh

Professor; Associate Chair

Michael Balogh Professor Balogh's research uses the world’s largest telescopes to study the physical properties of distant galaxies. Through spectroscopy we can learn about the distances, ages, chemical composition and star formation histories of these galaxies. As the light we observe from more distant objects originated at earlier times, by observing ever more distant systems we can reconstruct the changes that occur over time to populations of galaxies. His particular expertise lies in trying to understand the source of the puzzling link between galaxy growth rates and surrounding large-scale structure, many orders of magnitude larger than the galaxies themselves.

Contact information
Office: PHY 254
Phone: 519 888-4567 ext. 37518
Email: mbalogh@uwaterloo.ca
Website: http://quixote.uwaterloo.ca/~mbalogh/

Expertise

Galaxy formation and evolution
Galaxy clusters and the intracluster medium

Research

Most of the mass in our Universe is made up of dark matter, which interacts only gravitationally. Gravity causes this dark matter to form larger and larger structures as time goes on, leading to a characteristic filamentary distribution of mass that is reflected in the large scale distribution of galaxies today. This structure is the foundation on which galaxies form and evolve; but the growth of galaxies is a much more complex process that involves exchanges of vast amount of energies over large spatial and time scales. Professor Balogh uses the the world's largest telescopes to measure how the mass, age and chemical composition of galaxies changes with time, and how that relates to the surrounding large scale dark matter structure. This requires careful photometric and spectroscopic measurements at optical and near-infrared wavelengths; interpreting the data requires both the development of toy models to identify the driving parameters, as well as detailed comparison with numerical simulations to understand the interplay between competing physical processes.

Teaching

PHYS270, Astronomical Observations, Instrumentation and Data Analysis
ECE105, Physics of Electrical Engineering 1
PHYS788, Special Topics in Astrophysics
PHYS375, Stars
PHYS115, Mechanics
PHYS 275, Planets

Highlighted Publications

Balogh, Michael L., McGee, Sean L., Mok, Angus, Wilman, David J., Finoguenov, Alexis, Bower, Richard G., Mulchaey, John S., Parker, Laura C., Tanaka, Masayuki. The GEEC2 spectroscopic survey of Galaxy groups at 0.8 < z < 1. MNRAS (3), volume 443, pp. 2679-2694.

McGee, Sean L., Balogh, Michael L., Wilman, David J., Bower, Richard G., Mulchaey, John S., Parker, Laura C., Oemler, Augustus Jr. The Dawn of the Red: star formation histories of group galaxies over the past 5 billion years. MNRAS (2), volume 413, pp 996-1012.

McGee, Sean L., Balogh, Michael L., Bower, Richard G., Font, Andreea S., McCarthy, Ian G. The accretion of galaxies into groups and clusters. MNRAS (2), volume 400, pp 937-950.

Balogh, Michael L., McCarthy, Ian G., Bower, Richard G., Eke, Vincent R. Testing cold dark matter with the hierarchical build-up of stellar light. MNRAS (2), volume 385, pp 1003-1014.

Gilbank, David G., Balogh, Michael L. Tracking down a critical halo mass for killing galaxies through the growth of the red sequence. MNRAS (1), volume 385, pp L116-L119.

Please see SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System for a complete list of Professor Balogh's publications.