Min Yun
University of Massachusetts, MA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Light at millimeter wavelengths, far redder than the eye can see, reveals cold dust and gas, the raw material from which stars and galaxies are made. Observing it needs a very large dish on a high, dry site.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
millimeter astronomy
radio telescope
Large Millimeter Telescope
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Sustain operations of the 50-meter Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano as a US-Mexico collaboration and maintain US community access, bridging to a longer-term partnership.
- Allocate fifteen percent of total telescope time, half the share controlled by UMass, to US-based observers through an annual open proposal competition.
- Enable rapid wide-field surveys of dust-obscured galaxies and star-forming regions with TolTEC, a 7000-pixel multi-wavelength continuum camera and polarimeter, covering 130-300 GHz far faster than ALMA.
- Support spectroscopy of cooling lines such as CO, [C I] and [C II] in distant galaxies to determine redshifts and probe the physical and dynamical state of the gas fueling their activity.
- Enable early millimeter follow-up of time-domain transients discovered by the Rubin and Roman survey facilities, and maintain the telescope's role as an anchor station of the Event Horizon Telescope.
More about the research
The Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano is a 50-meter radio dish operating between 4 and 0.8 millimeters, built by a binational collaboration between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Mexico, with the Instituto Nacional de Astrofisica, Optica, y Electronica in the leading role. It has the largest effective single-dish collecting area in the world in these wavebands.
Why it matters
Keeping US astronomers' access to the world's largest single millimeter dish sustains work on how galaxies form and evolve, how stars are born, and how matter behaves around black holes, since the telescope is an essential station in the global array that images black hole shadows. Fast wide-field surveys with this facility could also provide early millimeter follow-up for changing sources found by major new survey telescopes, and the program gives students and early-career researchers observing experience.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Katherine Whitaker
University of Massachusetts, MA·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Map large statistical samples of massive galaxies and their environments across cosmic history using the Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope.
Karen Masters
Haverford College, PA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Test whether atomic hydrogen (HI) depletion times in MaNGA galaxies vary with ionization and heating sources, using HI-MaNGA 21 cm data combined with MaNGA galaxy maps.
Caitlin Casey
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Characterize the thermal dust emission of galaxies across cosmic time using diverse far-infrared and millimeter (FIR/mm) observational datasets.
The school
University of Massachusetts: 28 labs on PI Pages, $282M a year on research, 337 research doctorates a year.
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