Collaborative Research: Tracking Galaxy Growth with 200,000 Spectroscopic Redshifts

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Dr Coil, Dr Blanton and Dr Eisenstein will analyze their large survey of 300,000 galaxies, to understand the growth and evolution of the stellar bodies of galaxies over the past several billion years in the context of the current standard Cold Dark Matter models. The team has surveyed a region of 11 square degrees with prism spectroscopy from the 6.5-meter Magellan telescope. They determined the redshifts z, and hence the distances, for galaxies seen as they were between 2.5 and 8.5 billion years ago (0.2 z 1.2). Combining optical and near-infrared data, the team will estimate how the rate of star formation and the stellar masses of galaxies changed over this period, which covers almost half of cosmic history. They will measure how closely the objects cluster on the sky, and investigate the relation between a galaxy's nuclear activity and its rate of starbirth by comparing galaxies with active nuclei to those without. Statistics of close galaxy pairs will test models for the rate at which nearby galaxies merge with each other. Three graduate students will be trained through their involvement in the research. The team will release their data and catalogs to the community. Dr Blanton and Dr Eisenstein have an excellent track record in releasing large catalogs of data in a form useful to other workers, such as the 'value-added' catalogs for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.