Kim Venn

Welcome to our website! I am a stellar spectroscopist interested in the origin of the elements and the nature of dwarf galaxies and star clusters. The faintest dwarf galaxies appear to be systems that have undergone much less star formation and chemical evolution than the Milky Way, so that the chemistry of their stars can reveal the contributions from individual (or a few) nucleosynthetic events, including massive stars and kilonova explosions. The dwarf galaxies themselves also provide unique astrophysical laboratories for probing the fundamental properties of dark matter. Specifically, stellar velocity dispersions are used to trace the gravitational potentials in dwarf galaxies, suggesting large mass-to-light ratios and dark matter concentrations that are then used to predict properties of the dark matter particles themselves. My group is currently studying these questions using high resolution spectra of metal-poor stars in nearby dwarf galaxies taken with the newly commissioned Gemini/GHOST spectrograph as part of a 200-hour Large Program (GHOULS). We are also involved in the Pristine survey, an international collaboration using CFHT/MegaCam narrow-band imaging to map metal-poor stars throughout the Galaxy and Local Group satellites. Our group will also contribute to the European WEAVE-Pristine high-resolution spectroscopic survey using new machine learning data analysis techniques.

Kim's personal website can be found here.

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