Page History
...
With the successful launch of JWST, the "Galaxy Slice and Dice" research group is looking for graduate students to work on galaxy and cosmology-related projects. We are looking for up to 2 students to work primarily with Susan Kassin, an AURA Associate Astronomer with tenure at Space Telescope, and 1 student to work primarily with Camilla Pacifici, a CSA Astronomer at Space Telescope. Susan and Camilla have been close collaborators for nearly a decade, working on JWST preparatory science. Science talks by Susan and Cami can be found here and here. Our group is composed primarily of observers, but we work closely with includes theorists such as JHU postdoc Charlotte Welker.
We have a successful JWST Cycle 1 program that will obtain the deepest spectra of high redshift galaxies with the $10 billion telescope, program 2123: "A Pathfinder for JWST Spectroscopy: Deep High Spectral Resolution Maps of Galaxies over 1<z<6." We sincerely hope that these . We believe these data will lead to ground-breaking results on how galaxies evolve over cosmic time, and in particular about the complex and violent activities of violent physical processes in the era first few generations of galaxies in the Universe. And As the first of its kind, we hope the data will also come with some bring interesting surprises that will challenge our understanding of the physical processes in the nascent Universe. Our project will be the first to create spectral maps of galaxies using a new technique that we developed. Here are some good introductory videos on JWSTand galaxy formation/cosmology. JHU grad student Alexander de la Vega recently gave a talk summarizing galaxy science in the program.
There are myriad possible science projects, and all will be the first of their kind since we've never had data like these! Students will be briefly introduced to each topic before they decide on a given project to ensure a good match. Here are a few possible projects; there are many more. (1) From theory, we expect that galaxies have chaotic and complex dynamics early-on. It is unclear whether these early systems are even virialized, or perhaps can even be called galaxies. Our data will allow us to measurer the first time how the dynamics of galaxies evolve from the early Universe to today. (2) Significant and ubiquitous outflows in galaxies are needed to reionize the Universe according to our current theoretical understanding. Our extremely deep spectra will measure any violent outflows that are expected in the early Universe. This is crucial for determining how the Universe was reionized, not to mention how galaxies formed. (3) For the first time we will accurately measure the rates at which galaxies form stars over a significant range in cosmic history. We will do this with key emission lines that only JWST can observe. Finally, it's worth mentioning that a particular strength of our research group is that we all study the same galaxies from a different perspective, and then combine these perspectives to form a more complete picture.
...
