Astronomers given $339,000 NSF grant to analyze newly found galaxies
Grant Wilson and Min Yun of the Astronomy Department have been awarded a $339,000 National Science Foundation grant to analyze data from the AzTEC camera, one of the new instruments built on campus as part of the Large Millimeter Telescope, a 50-meter millimeter-wavelength instrument now nearing completion in Mexico.
AzTEC has spent the past two years as a visiting instrument at the Atacama Submillimeter Telescope Experiment in Chile.
The AzTEC team led by Wilson will compile a catalog of more than 1,000 newly discovered galaxies from their ultra-sensitive millimeter-wavelength imaging. According to Wilson, the newly discovered galaxies are encased in cocoons of dust created by their own prolific formation of new stars.
Although they are some of the most massive galaxies ever formed and one might expect the stars inside to be more visible, most of their optical light is unable to penetrate the dust, making the galaxies undetectable even to the most powerful optical instruments such as the Hubble Space Telescope. The AzTEC camera senses the thermal glow from their warm dust and allows astronomers to “see” into the otherwise hidden galaxies, believed to be critical building blocks for the most massive galaxies in the present-day universe. Surveying them for the NSF as part of the largest and most sensitive catalog ever assembled should have long-lasting legacy value and play a pivotal role in our understanding of how galaxies form and evolve with time, said Wilson.
July 7, 2009.
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