Dr Tom Williams

Dr Tom Williams is a Research Associate at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford.

Tom is an observational astronomer interested in how cold, molecular hydrogen transforms into stars, and how the conditions within a galaxy affect this. Questions such as ‘do spiral arms form stars more efficiently?’, or ‘how do galaxies shut off their star formation?’ are the kinds of things he is trying to answer.

To do this, Tom uses high-resolution observations of nearby galaxies across a broad wavelength range. Recently, he has mostly been focusing on using data from ALMA, MUSE, and now the JWST to trace stars, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies.

At Oxford, Tom is working with Professor Martin Bureau and the WISDOM collaboration to look at the gas and star formation in early-type galaxies. These ‘red-and-dead’ galaxies have very little star formation, and are often seen as the end-point of galaxy evolution. Despite this, they often do have some amount of star formation, and more intriguingly, a lot of molecular gas.

Tom’s work is offering a new perspective on these galaxies, as their ‘deaths’ may have been greatly exaggerated.