Peek and Graves 2010 dust correction maps are now available!!

My research broadly focuses on interstellar gas and dust in and around the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. If you'd like to know more about interstellar gas you can watch my award-winning lecture, Outer Space!, as given at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

One of my main interests is in how our Galaxy gets the gas it needs to form stars, and how it ejects gas into its halo. Stars in our Galaxy are continually being formed out of gas, dying, and dispersing heavier elements back into the interstellar and circumgalactic gas. By examining the fraction of these heavier metals in stars researchers have found that our Galaxy must be getting replenished by fresh gas over time. I am looking for this expected accretion process in high-velocity clouds, the cooling of a possible massive baryonic halo around our Galaxy, gaseous dwarf satellites orbiting the Galaxy and the interface between the thin, cold disk of our Galaxy and the halo. I have a particular interest in using 21-cm line radio observations and observations of astronomical dust observations to trace this cycle.

I am also interested in the structure of the diffuse interstellar medium and its relationship to accretion, star formation and Galactic evolution. I work on nearby, cold gas clouds and other neutral features in the high Galactic latitude sky.

Part of the all-sky HI survey of the Galaxy, LAB.