Douglas Clowe
Education
- Ph.D., University of Hawaii
Research Interests
- Astrophysics
- Cosmology
- Gravitational Lensing
- Clusters of Galaxies
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Douglas Clowe works in the field of observational cosmology, using weak gravitational lensing to study clusters of galaxies and their surrounding medium. The primary goals of his research are to measure the fundamental parameters of the universe, to determine the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and to measure the structural evolution of massive objects in the universe. Other goals of his research include the measurement of the redshift distribution of the faint galaxy population, the luminosity function and spatial distribution of cluster dwarf galaxies, and the evolution of the cluster galaxy population.
Clowe's work using the "Bullet Cluster," a merger of two clusters of galaxies, provided the first direct evidence that dark matter must exist independently of any assumptions about how gravity works on cosmic scales.
Clowe was an undergraduate at Caltech and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii. He held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, the University of Bonn, and the University of Arizona before joining the faculty at Ohio University in 2006.