Tiffany wins an ACEnet research fellowship for the summer of 2015. These competitive awards, worth $5000, go to the best undergraduate students planning to work in computationally-intensive science areas. Tiffany will be working with PhD student Bobby Sorba and other members of our group on speeding up galaxy SED-fitting with innovative applications of KDtrees.
Bobby’s paper on the spatially-resolved SED fitting of nearby galaxies is accepted for publication in the MNRAS. This is an important piece of work as it not only uncovers an important systematic in the widely-used method of estimating masses of nearby, and distant, galaxies, but also provides a statistical remedy that shows how to alleviate its effects.
2015 June 8: Ryan wraps up honours thesis
Ryan dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on his BSc honours thesis entitled Modelling the Properties of High Mass Galaxies at High Redshift. This caps Ryan’s undergradute degree at SMU. Congratulations, Ryan. Well done!
2015 July 21: The 2nd semester of CLAUDS observing is done... 3rd semester about to begin
The image shows a handful of low-z galaxies against a background of distant objects. This is only a tiny fraction of the ~20 square degrees that are being covered by CLAUDS to a depth of U=27AB.
I just got back from China and Japan, where I visited colleagues at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University and at the Kavli IPMU in Tokyo. Lots of good discussions about the CLAUDS project.
Anneya and I are in Princeton for the HyperSuprimeCam (HSC) survey all-hands meeting. This was a very exciting gathering as the HSC instrument is now hitting its stride and taking great data. I presented an update on our CLAUDS survey (which partners with the HSC survey) and there was a lot of enthusiasm from people wanting to use our U-band (near-UV) data in combination with the longer-wavelength HSC observations.
Visiting CFHT with SMU PhD students Anneya Golob and Diego Castaneda (pictured at left on the CFHT catwalk looking towards Gemini-North). Anneya’s thesis project is using our ongoing CLAUDS survey on CFHT to study environmental effects on the evolution of galaxies and she was not only able to tour the summit and base facilities but participate in a few nights of CFHT observing.