(Credit: https://webb.nasa.gov)
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, and 1 student to work primarily with Camilla Pacifici, a CSA Astronomer. Susan and Camilla have been close collaborators for nearly a decade. Our group is composed primarily observers, but work closely with 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 data will lead to ground-breaking results on how galaxies evolve over time, and in particular about the complex and violent activities of the era first few generations of galaxies in the Universe. And we hope the data will also come with some 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 is a good introductory video on this general subject area.
There are myriad possible science projects, and the students will be briefly introduced to each before they decide on a given project. Here are a few possible projects; there are many more. (1) Measure how the dynamics of galaxies evolve from the early Universe to today. 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 address this. (2) We will also have deep enough spectra to measure the violent outflows that are expected in the early Universe. This is crucial for determining how the Universe was reionized. Significant and ubiquitous outflows are needed for this phase transition in the Universe... or perhaps our current ideas are incorrect. (3)
Susan Kassin and the newly re-branded "Slice and Dice" research group are looking for graduate students to work on this program. Kassin is an AURA Associate Astronomer with tenure and a research scientist at JHU. Students will be involved in choosing the science (kinematics, outflows, metallicities, star-formation histories) which can cover observations and simulations.
Those of us in "Slice and Dice" are passionate about diversity efforts, and hope that our group is a welcoming and safe space for new ideas and scientific and technical development.
We work closely with the JWST teams at Space Telescope (ST), astronomers at ST, and have close collaborators at the University of Arizona, UC Santa Cruz, and the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.
We also have opportunities for outreach and undergraduate and high school mentoring.
cycle 1 , will obtain the deepest spectra of nascent galaxies with the NIRSpec spectrograph. We will obtain spectral maps of galaxies using a new technique. The program is explained in this talk by current graduate student Alex de la Vega using figures made by Alex and postdoc Charlotte Welker with much input from the group.
We are currently in the process of updating our website, but an older list of members can be found here.
If you are interested, please drop Susan a line and we can talk. Also please feel free to reach out to any of the group members current and former.
Thanks for your interest!
Below is a figure made by postdoc Charlotte Welker, which Alex walks through in his talk. It shows a Hubble image an example galaxy from our program and it's possible kinematic maps (top row), possibly outflow maps (middle row), and possible science "pictures" that can be gleaned from the maps.
