Hello! My name is Ray Garner and I am a postdoc in the Astronomy Group at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. I am working with Dr. Rob Kennicutt on the Star formation, Ionized Gas, and Nebular Abundances Legacy Survey (SIGNALS), a survey of HII regions across ~60 galaxies. You can check out the survey paper here.
Before I arrived in College Station, I was a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio working with Prof. Chris Mihos on a detailed analysis of the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) and its small satellite group using the deep, wide-field, narrowband imaging capabilities of the Burrell Schmidt 24/36-inch telescope.
Briefly, my thesis utilizes narrowband images of H$\alpha$, H$\beta$, [OIII]$\lambda\lambda$4959,5007, and [OII]$\lambda\lambda$3726,3729. These images allowed me to search the entire M101 Group for outlying, intragroup star-forming regions (finding none), measure the oxygen abundance gradient of M101 (suggesting a broken gradient at $R_{25}$), and constrain stellar ages throughout the entire disk (finding a very dynamic spiral pattern). You can read more about that research below, or click here.
Before attending CWRU, I was a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina where I graduated with a B.S. in Physics, Summa Cum Laude. While there, I completed research in general relativity with Dr. Bill Baker. During the summer of 2017, I attended a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. There, I worked on ionized gas kinematics of nearby, low-mass galaxies with Dr. Liese van Zee.
PhD in Astronomy, 2023
Case Western Reserve University
BS in Physics, 2018
Furman University
We present the spectra of two faint star-forming objects originally identified in our deep narrowband survey of the M101 Group. One is an isolated HII region near the M101 Group galaxy NGC 5474, and the other is projected close to the background galaxy NGC 5486. Both are spectroscopically confirmed to be physically associated with their nearby host. We estimate the oxygen abundances for each system using strong-line methods. For the source near NGC 5474, we use GALEX UV photometry to estimate an age of ~200 Myr and suggest a connection to the M101-NGC 5474 interaction.