Page History

...

One of the frontier goals of observational cosmology is to understand the epoch of reionization (Fig 1, Robertson+2010) and its connection to the early star-forming galaxies. It is a popular belief that metal-poor dwarf galaxies were either the primary source or at least resemble those sources of ionizing photons that led to the reionization of the Universe. Characterizing the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM) of these metal-poor dwarfs is essential to understand the pristine conditions which existed within the first galaxies. Integral Field Spectroscopy is a very powerful technique combining imaging and spectroscopy that allows us to map the properties encoded in the emission lines emanating from the ionized gas within galaxies and hence perform a detailed spatially-resolved study. The technique has been used via integral field units (IFU) within several world-class ground-based and space-borne telescopes (e.g., Keck, VLT, JWST). The proposed project involves the analysis of the IFU data of a few dwarf galaxies to map the physical and chemical properties of the ISM. The project is timely because of the link between the dwarf galaxies and reionization-era galaxies, which are being routinely observed with the recently-launched JWST.  

Fig 1: (Robertson+2010), showing the cosmic history.  This project focuses on dwarf galaxies which are similar to sources that reionized the Universe.

Data: Proprietary IFU data from ground-based telescopes.

...