Thesis Title: Population Synthesis and Dark Matter in Spiral Galaxies
Ian Barton is an observational astronomer who has developed excellent skills in the field of high-precision surface photometry. His first publication was a photometric investigation of the extremely faint light distribution in the outer halo of the spiral galaxy NGC 5383. The aim of this study was to set stringent constraints on a possible population of white dwarf stars in the dark matter halo of spiral galaxy NGC 5383 (see I.J. Barton and L.A. Thompson, Astron. J., vol. 114, p. 655, 1997).
For his Ph.D. thesis, Ian Barton is using photometric techniques to investigate the mass- to-light ratio in two other spiral galaxies: M106 = NGC 4258 and M63 = NGC 5055. He will reconstruct the exact nature of the stellar population (via population synthesis) from the very the central regions of each galaxy to their faint outskirts based on photometrically calibrated images through the Johnson-Cousins filters VRI and Stromgren filters ubvy.
In addition, Ian Barton has collected Fabre-Perot spectrographic observation in the light of H-alpha emission in both galaxies so he can determine accurate galaxy rotation curves and hence the radial distribution of mass in both galaxies. His research will provide, for the first time ever, a very complete inventory, as a function of radius, of the stellar mass within two spiral galaxies that definitely have a dark and massive halo.
At the present time Mr. Barton is working in the high-tech communications industry in Chicago while he simultaneously puts the finishing touches on his Ph.D. dissertation. Mr. Barton has a more extensive summary of his astronomy research on his own homepage.