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My current research primarily focuses on running and analyzing cosmological hydrodynamic simulations of dwarf galaxies (and their interactions with massive hosts) with the goal of understanding how galaxies form and evolve, learning how star formation shapes and is shaped by galaxy properties, determining the effect of reionization on the early Universe, and testing the standard cosmological model, Lambda Cold Dark Matter Theory (LCDM). LCDM has been widely successful in predicting the counts, clustering, colors, morphologies, and evolution of galaxies on large scales, as well as a variety of cosmological observables. Despite these successes, several challenges have arisen to this model in recent years, most of them occurring at the smallest scales — those of dwarf galaxies. Therefore it is the study of the tiniest galaxies in the Universe (Mstar < 10^5 Msun) — made more accessible by the large number that have been recently discovered by the latest generation of surveys and telescopes — that best promises to yield answers (and even more questions!) about the nature of dark matter, star formation and destruction, how all galaxies form and evolve, and the Universe itself.




Selected Refereed Publications


Graduate Publications

Wheeler, Coral; Pace, Andrew B.; Bullock, James S.; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Onorbe, Jose; Fitts, Alex; Hopkins, Phil; Keres, Dusan; “The no-spin zone: rotation vs dispersion support in observed and simulated dwarf galaxies”, 2015, preprint (arxiv:1511.01095), submitted to MNRAS

Wheeler, Coral; Onorbe, Jose; Bullock, James S.; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Elbert, Oliver; Garrison-Kimmel, Shea; Hopkins, Phil; Keres, Dusan; “Sweating the small stuff: simulating dwarf galaxies, ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, and their own tiny satellites ”, MNRAS, 2015, Volume 453, Issue 2, p.1305-1316

Wheeler, Coral; Phillips, John I.; Cooper, Michael C.; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Bullock, James S., “The surprising inefficiency of dwarf satellite quenching”, MNRAS, 2014, Volume 442, Issue 2, p.1396-1404

Fillingham, Sean; Cooper, Michael C.; Wheeler, Coral; Garrison-Kimmel, Shea; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Bullock, James S., “Taking care of business in a flash: Constraining the timescale for low-mass satellite quenching with ELVIS”, MNRAS, 2015, Volume 454, Issue 2, p.2039-2049

Phillips, John I.; Wheeler, Coral; Cooper, Michael C.; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Bullock, James S.; Tollerud, Erik J., “The mass dependance of satellite quenching in Milky Way-like halos”, MNRAS, 2015, Volume 447, Issue 1, p.698-710

Phillips, John I.; Wheeler, Coral; Boylan-Kolchin, Michael; Bullock, James S.; Cooper, Michael C.; Tollerud, Erik J., “ A dichotomy in satellite quenching around L* galaxies”, MNRAS, 2014, Volume 437, Issue 2, p.1930-1941

Kaufmann, Tobias; Wheeler, Coral; Bullock, James S., “On the morphologies, gas fractions, and star formation rates of small galaxies&rdquo, MNRAS, 2007, Volume 382, Issue 3, pp. 1187-1195

Undergraduate Publications

C R Wheeler, R D Ramsier and P N Henriksen, “Visibility of thin-film interference fringes, Amer. J. Phys. 72, 279, 2004

C R Wheeler, R D Ramsier and P N Henriksen, “Observing thin-film interference effects, Phys. Educ. 38, No 6, 495-496, Nov 2003

C R Wheeler, R D Ramsier and P N Henriksen, “An investigation of the temporal coherence length of light, Eur. J. Phys. 24 No 4, 443-450, July 2003

Brian Cheyne, Vishal Gupta, Coral Wheeler, “Hamilton cycles in addition graphs, Rose Hullman Undergraduate Mathematics Journal, Volume 4(1), 2003

CURRICULUM VITAE

Contact

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Email

CORAL@CALTECH.EDU
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