Sally Oey

Sally Oey’s group is studying massive star populations and the escape of ionizing radiation from starburst galaxies and super star clusters. The group is at the forefront of establishing a new paradigm for massive-star feedback, where superwinds from compact young star clusters fail to launch. Members have used numerical simulations and image processing techniques to investigate such conditions for allowing ionizing radiation to penetrate the dense gas in star-forming clouds and the interstellar medium in “green pea” galaxies and resolved nearby starbursts. The ionizing radiation may originate from massive binaries and their products, thus group members are carrying out data mining of observational surveys and binary population synthesis models to study how binarity manifests in stellar populations.