NORMAN, Okla. ( KFOR ) — Dr. Nikki Nielsen saw outer space up close and personal recently, and she got the opportunity with her research, while analyzing the highest resolution photo of a distant galaxy we’ve ever seen.
Inside the walls of Nielsen Hall on the University of Oklahoma campus marked her first semester as an assistant professor there. Even after her big find, she’s also teaching her students to reach for the stars.
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“Where do all the elements that we are made of come from?” She said. “To do that, we need to look at how stars form, how planets form, but also how galaxies come to be.”
It wasn’t long ago that she went to Hawaii’s Keck Observatory, atop the Mauna Kea volcano, to reach for herself. She reached about 270 million light years to be exact and took the highest resolution picture of a distant galaxy that we’ve ever seen.
“All that purple stuff around the galaxy is what we found,” she said.