TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- University of Alabama sophomore Christy Covington of Huntsville will present a poster presentation on “An H-Alpha Survey of the Butcher-Oemler Cluster Abell 851” at the American Astronomical Society Conference in Nashville on May 26.

Covington has worked with Dr. William Keel, UA professor of astronomy, on this project since February.

“Hopefully we will shed some light on a fundamental theoretical question faced by astronomers and astrophysicists alike,” Covington said.

The project compares the star-formation rate of galaxies in a very rich cluster at high redshift to what we see in the local Universe. Such clusters once contained many more spiral galaxies than they do today, and this project addresses what happened to the spirals in the last few billion years, Keel explained.

Data has been collected from the Kitt Peak National Observatory four-meter telescope and a charge-coupled device mosaic, a camera that takes photos in the telescope, to measure the H-alpha emission from the galaxy cluster Abell 851. The research has not been completed. These data also add to the interpretation of Hubble images of a small part of this field, since its camera doesn't have the right filters to do more than 1/1000 of this area at the right wavelengths, Keel added.

This summer, Covington will conduct astrophysics research at Baylor University’s Center for Astrophysics, Space Physics and Engineering Research.