Deep Wide-Field Surveys of Emission-Line Galaxies

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This project supports science activities that capitalize on the recent, NSF-supported development of two revolutionary instruments: the Maryland-Magellan Tunable Filter (MMTF) and the NOAO Extremely Wide-Field Infrared Mosaic (NEWFIRM). The MMTF, operating on the 6.5-meter Magellan-Baade telescope, can produce 27-arcminute-wide images in narrow spectral bandpasses (5 to 15 Angstrom width) in the visible and near infrared (5000 to 9200 Angstrom wavelength). NEWFIRM, operating on the NOAO Mayall and Blanco 4-meter telescopes, is fully cryogenically cooled infrared imager with a 28 arcminute field of view. The Principal Investigator and collaborators led the commissioning of MMTF, and contributed greatly to the success of NEWFIRM by providing narrow-band and ultra-narrow-band filters and developing the data reduction pipeline. The renewal of funding provided by this award will enable continued user support for MMTF observers, enhancement of the data reduction pipelines of NEWFIRM, and completion of three doctoral dissertations based on recently acquired MMTF and NEWFIRM data. The first dissertation project is a detailed analysis of the warm ionized gas filaments in the cores of galaxy groups and clusters; MMTF data will be combined with new and archived X-ray and UV data to determine the origin of the hot, cooling, and cooled material. In the second, NEWFIRM is being used to search for line-emitting galaxies out to a redshift of 7.7. More than a dozen high-redshift candidates, and a few hundred low mass star-forming galaxies at lower redshift, have been identified, and their spectra will be obtained in follow-up observations. The third project makes use of both NEWFIRM and MMTF, along with spectroscopic data, to study the dynamically important molecular component in a representative sample of nearby, wind-blowing galaxies, in order to constrain the impact of winds on the intergalactic environment.