My graduate research has been conducted with the ODIN Survey Collaboration led by PI Kyoung-Soo Lee and Co-I Eric Gawiser. The ODIN team comprises many researchers in the US, Korea, Chile, Taiwan, and Argentina.

For those visiting from beyond the astronomy field:
ODIN is a survey designed to study the fundamental physics that drives the evolution of our universe by examining the formation and evolution of ancient galaxy populations. Specifically, we are interested in studying Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies, or LAEs for short. LAEs are a unique type of galaxy that births lots of baby stars, which gives them a special glow and makes them easy to detect. Since the light from LAEs takes time to travel all the way through the universe to Earth, by the time we see their glow, billions of years have already passed. Because of this, these LAEs help to illuminate the ancient universe. In our work, we look at three different populations of LAEs that existed at slightly different times during a period in the universe’s history when galaxies started to gather closer together and form complex and beautiful webs. By studying these populations of LAEs statistically, we can map out those webs and see how they have changed over time. This will help us to uncover the fundamental physics that drives the evolution of our universe. 


For those visiting from the astronomy field:
The One-hundred-square-degree DECam Imaging in Narrowbands (ODIN) Survey is a NOIRLab program designed to discover Lyman Alpha Emitting Galaxies (LAEs) using the Dark Energy Camera on the Víctor M. Blanco 4m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. This project utilizes three custom-made narrow band filters centered at wavelengths 419 nm, 501 nm, and 673 nm to create samples of candidate LAEs at redshifts 2.4, 3.1, and 4.5, respectively. These filters allow us to view snapshots of the LAE distribution 1.4, 2.1, and 2.8 billion years after the Big Bang. With the results of this survey, we expect to create a sample of >100,000 LAEs as well as protoclusters and Lyman Alpha Blobs across 7 deep fields. Examining the distribution of LAEs at these redshifts will allow us to trace the large-scale structure of the universe during the peak epoch of cluster formation and begin to answer many intriguing quandaries in modern cosmology. 

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My work is funded by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-2233066, NSF grant AST-2206222, and NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program grant 80NSSC22K0487.

💫 Click here to learn more about the Víctor M. Blanco 4m Telescope
💫 Click here to learn more about the Dark Energy Camera from the Dark Energy Survey team
💫 Click here to learn more about NOIRLab
💫 Click here to learn more about the Gawiser research group


↓ Click on the papers below to read more ↓