Seed Spoon Science

We are honored to be funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for a new pilot program to support diversity equity and inclusion. The program will work with STEM Latinx undergraduates and elementary school kids to create science experiments in gardens and to support STEM learning in the current and next generation of Latinx students.

You can read more about it in this UCSC news article.

First Merian Data

We started the 62 night Merian program on the Blanco telescope on March 5th. We had beautiful weather on the first night with excellent seeing. Exciting start for this new program!

The Merian Survey

We had a very large program approved! The Merian survey is a new program that will use 62 nights on the Blanco telescope starting in 2021 to build an unprecedented sample of dwarf galaxies. I am co-leading this program together with Jenny Greene. More details can be found on The Merian Survey website.

First observatory named after a woman

 

Wonderful news today! The LSST telescope has been renamed after Vera Rubin (credited with cementing the discovery of dark matterThis image requires alt text, but the alt text is currently blank. Either add alt text or mark the image as decorative.). This will be the first national US observatory to be named after a women.

 

https://www.lsst.org/news/vro-press-release

New surprises for old galaxies

Massive and old galaxies still harbor new surprises. A new publication by Song Huang uses weak gravitational lensing to reveal a tight correlation between the total stellar mass, the shape of the galaxy profile (or size of the galaxy) and it’s parent dark matter halo. This study harnesses the unique imaging capabilities of the Hyper Supreme Cam survey on the Subaru telescope.

First Cosmology Results from HSC

The first Cosmic shear measurements from the Hyper Supreme Cam Survey (HSC) on Subaru are now on the arXive (Hikage et al. 2018) !! This paper is the culmination of a tremendous effort of many scientists across the globe and a testimony to the beautiful data quality of the HSC camera on the Subaru Telescope. The HSC cosmic shear results are in agreement with Planck. However, interestingly, in a similar fashion to several other lensing surveys, the constraints in terms of the Sigma8 and OmegaM parameters are slightly offset. A consistent reanalysis of various lensing data sets, and higher signal-to-noise constraints from the full HSC data set will help to rule out or confirm this much discussed offset. More details can be found in our press release.

DOE Career Grant

I am honored to be awarded a DOE CAREER grant to work on DESI and LSST! Very excited to start to begin collecting DESI data soon (2019/2020)

 

 

 

Stellar Halos of Massive Galaxies

Song Huang has posted the first paper in a series on the Extended Stellar Halos of Massive Galaxies. This paper takes advantage of stunning new data from the Hyper Suprime Cam Survey (which is both wide and deep) to map out the light profiles of several thousand massive galaxies to 100 kpc. Song finds a large diversity in the outskirts of massive galaxies. But this scatter in not completely random … in a forthcoming paper, Song will show that this scatter correlates with the dark matter halo mass that hosts these giant galaxies. Stay tuned!