Research Interests

Prof. Steven Finkelstein – “I study the processes by which galaxies evolve through time, from extremely small systems in the early universe, to form large galaxies today like our own Milky Way. I discover these galaxies using imaging from space telescopes. Members of my group and I study these images to both discover and characterize distant galaxies, and we use the largest ground-based telescopes to follow them up spectroscopically. I am also heavily involved in the HETDEX project, and we are working to build the next great extragalactic legacy field in a 24 square degree region of the HETDEX survey (the HETDEX/SHELA field) where we are amassing imaging from the optical to infrared from both ground and space-based telescopes. In the near future we will use data from the James Webb Space Telescope to push even closer to the Big Bang, using data from the CEERS and WDEEP programs to discover some of the earliest galaxies to form in the universe.”

Dr. Micaela Bagley – “I study some of the brightest galaxies in the early universe, using them to learn how galaxies form and evolve as well as how they contributed to the ionization of the neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium… Lyman-alpha emission is produced primarily through star formation, when young, hot stars ionizing the hydrogen surrounding them, and the photons recombine to The dark ages that followed recombination ended with the appearance of metal-free stars and the subsequent formation of numerous low-mass, metal-poor galaxies. The collective ionizing background from these newly-forming galaxies is thought to be responsible for the reionization of the diffuse hydrogen in the intergalactic medium between redshifts 10 and 6.5. The progression of the reionization history of the universe depends on the nature of these first sources — their number densities, luminosities, clustering, and production rates of ionizing photons — which is currently the subject of considerable observational and theoretical efforts.”

Dr. Gene Leung – “I am an observational astronomer specializing in extragalactic astronomy. My research focuses on the emission of Lyman-alpha photons in high redshift galaxies and the process of reionization of the early Universe. I am also interested in the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) across the galaxy population and through cosmic time.”

Oscar Chavez Ortiz – “My research area focuses on studying a specific type of star-forming galaxies called Lyman-Alpha Emitters or LAEs for short. We want to uncover if there are any physical ties between a galaxy’s physical properties and the emission of Lyman alpha so that we can use these physical properties to predict Lyman alpha emission from galaxies at higher redshifts. We are using the Texas-Euclid Search for Lyman Alpha (TESLA) survey to find a large sample of LAEs, we expect ~50,000 LAEs, to carry out this analysis. This research will be instrumental in generating a predictive model of emerged Lyman-alpha emission that is tied to SED-derived galaxy properties. The predictive model can then be used to measure the neutral fraction during the epoch of reionization and can help in discerning between two competing reionization models, Late or early reionization.”

Galaxy Evolution VIP

At UT Austin… "What starts here changes the world."