The Observations of Redshift Evolution in Large Scale Environments (ORELSE) Survey

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).Dr. Lubin will use a multi-object spectrograph on the 10-meter Keck telescope to measure redshifts (speed of motion away from the observer) for galaxies in and around 20 distant galaxy clusters. Optical and near-infrared images will be used to map out the distribution of galaxies on scales exceeding 30 million light years. Both the colors of the galaxies and the details of their spectra will be used to probe their star-forming history, and to examine how the pace of starbirth is related to their surroundings. Radio and X-ray observations will reveal which galaxies have active nuclei. The aim is to probe connections between properties of the galaxies themselves, the galaxy clusters, and the surrounding large-scale structure over this period between 6 billion and 9 billion years ago, when galaxies like our Milky Way were very actively forming their stars.Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained through their involvement in the research. Dr. Lubin has a good record of working with women students and those from under-represented groups. The large databases assembled during the research should be very useful to other workers, and will form the basis for interactive tutorials for upper-division astrophysics courses.