Mark Voit
Professor of Astronomy | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Mark Voit is an expert in galaxy clusters and how their growth reflects the evolution of the universe as a whole.
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Biography
Mark Voit graduated from Cheltenham High School in 1979 and from Princeton in 1983, with an A.B. in Astrophysical Sciences. His Ph.D. in Astrophysics (1990) is from the University of Colorado. Then came three years as a Research Fellow at Caltech, two more as a Hubble Fellow at Johns Hopkins, and eight as an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, working on the Hubble Space Telescope project, before Michigan State brought him on board in 2003.
Mark Voit's research lately has been directed at understanding clusters of galaxies and how their growth and development reflects the evolution of the universe as a whole. Galaxy clusters are excellent tracers of structure formation in the universe because they are the largest structures that have so far achieved dynamical equilibrium. They are also excellent laboratories for studying the processes that regulate galaxy evolution because they are among the few places where we can observe the hot gas that surrounds those galaxies.
Industry Expertise (3)
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Areas of Expertise (3)
Galaxies
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Education (2)
University of Colorado: Ph.D., Astrophysics 1990
Princeton: B.A., Astrophysical Sciences 1983
Journal Articles (5)
A Galaxy-Scale Fountain of Cold Molecular Gas Pumped by a Black Hole
A Galaxy-Scale Fountain of Cold Molecular Gas Pumped by a Black Hole2018 We present ALMA and MUSE observations of the Brightest Cluster Galaxy in Abell 2597, a nearby (z=0.0821) cool core cluster of galaxies. The data map the kinematics of a three billion solar mass filamentary nebula that spans the innermost 30 kpc of the galaxy's core.
A Global Model for Circumgalactic and Cluster-core Precipitation
The Astrophysical Journal2017 We provide an analytic framework for interpreting observations of multiphase circumgalactic gas that is heavily informed by recent numerical simulations of thermal instability and precipitation in cool-core galaxy clusters.
Crowded Field Galaxy Photometry: Precision Colors in the CLASH Clusters
The Astrophysical Journal2017 We present a new method for photometering objects in galaxy clusters. We introduce a mode-filtering technique for removing spatially variable backgrounds, improving both detection and photometric accuracy (roughly halving the scatter in the red sequence compared to previous catalogs of the same clusters).
ALMA observations of cold molecular gas filaments trailing rising radio bubbles in PKS 0745−191
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,2016 We present ALMA observations of the CO(1–0) and CO(3–2) line emission tracing filaments of cold molecular gas in the central galaxy of the cluster PKS 0745−191.
Tracing cosmic evolution with clusters of galaxies
Reviews of Modern Physics2005 The most successful cosmological models to date envision structure formation as a hierarchical process in which gravity is constantly drawing lumps of matter together to form increasingly larger structures. Clusters of galaxies currently sit atop this hierarchy as the largest objects that have had time to collapse under the influence of their own gravity.
