Carlton (Tad) Pryor

Professor
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Contact Information:

Office Hours: Call or email to set up an appointment.

Professional Information:

• Curriculum vitae and bibliography
• Physics Department directory page

Teaching:

While at Rutgers the undergraduate astronomy courses that I have taught include topical lecture courses, advanced labs, and surveys for both science and non-science majors. At the graduate level, I have taught courses on stars, cosmology, and observational techniques.

The course that I taught in Fall 2006 was the undergraduate course Physics 444: Introduction to Cosmology.

Web pages for some courses that I have taught in the past several years are Physics 608: Cosmology Physics 629: Observational Techniques, Physics 442: High Energy Astrophysics and Radiative Processes, Physics 343: Observational Radio Astronomy, Physics 344: Observational Optical Astronomy, and Physics 109: Astronomy and Cosmology.

Research:

My research interests are centered on observational and theoretical studies of the structure and evolution of both star clusters and individual galaxies. I am currently surveying the kinematics, mass distributions, and stellar contents of the dense centers of globular star clusters, the oldest clusters in our Galaxy. With the Rutgers Imaging Fabry-Perot Spectrometer in Chile, we have been able to increase the number of stellar radial velocities in these regions by an order of magnitude, thus providing a clearer picture of some of the most extreme stellar environments known. Another way to study the kinematics of globular clusters is using proper motions for individual stars measured with images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. One use for such data is searching for a massive black hole near the center of a cluster. I am a member of a group with such data for several clusters.

I am also studying the amount and spatial distribution of dark matter in the dwarf spheroidal companions of our Galaxy in an attempt to determine what the dark matter is. Currently I am using the Hubble Space Telescope imaging to measure the systemic proper motions of the Carina, Draco, Fornax, Sculptor, Sextans, and Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxies. These motions yield the space velocity of each galaxy and, hence, its orbit around the Milky Way. Our goals are to use this information to determine if the dwarf spheroidals move together in coherent streams in the halo of our Galaxy and to constrain the importance of the Galactic tidal force in determining the structure and star-formation history of the dwarf spheroidals. We also use the motions of the dwarf spheroidals to constrain the mass of the Milky Way.

• Recent astrophysics research at Rutgers -- A more detailed discussion of research by all members of the astrophysics group.
• Rutgers Astrophysics Preprint Series

Current Projects:

• Globular Clusters
  • Radial velocity measurements for large samples of stars using the Rutgers Imaging Fabry Perot Spectrometer.
  • Adaptive optics spectroscopy of stars in crowded cluster cores.
  • HST STIS spectroscopy of stars in the central 1 arcsec of M15
  • Proper motions of cluster stars from HST imaging
  • Searches for binary stars in globular clusters.
• Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies
  • Searches for tidal debris around dSphs using broad-band (Piatek et al. 2001 and 2003) and, most recently, Washington-band photometry.
  • Measuring systemic proper motions for dwarf spheroidal galaxies (Piatek et al. 2002, AJ, 124, 3198; 2003, AJ, 126, 2346; 2005, AJ, 130, 95 2007, AJ, 133, 818 ).

Revised August 3, 2007