Ana Bonaca is Staff Member at Carnegie Observatories. Her specialty is stellar dynamics and her research aims to uncover the structure and evolution of our galaxy, the Milky Way, especially the dark matter halo that surrounds it. In her research, she uses space- and ground-based telescopes to measure the motions of stars, and constructs numerical experiments to discover how dark matter affected them.
She arrived in September 2021 from Harvard University where she held a prestigious Institute for Theory and Computation Fellowship.
Bonaca studies how the uneven pull of our galaxy’s gravity affects objects called globular clusters—spheres made up of a million stars bound together and orbiting a galactic core. The Milky Way is enveloped by a tenuous halo of about 150 of them. How the galaxy’s tidal forces disrupt these clusters, and the movement of the resulting debris, can teach us about the distribution of dark matter throughout the region and even reveal new details about how galaxies evolve. Crucially, her work incorporates both observational data, such as the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite’s images of the Milky Way, and high-resolution numerical simulations to probe the forces that shaped our galaxy and the universe.
Bonaca received a M.S. in physics from University of Zagreb, Croatia (2010) and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Yale University (2016).
