Measuring the Gas Content of Extreme Star-forming Galaxies across Cosmic Time

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Ximena Fernandez is awarded an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Her research seeks to understand how galaxies evolve; in particular, she is interested in those that are forming stars at a very high rate. The high star formation rates are triggered by interactions between galaxies at the present age of the Universe, but it is still unclear if this holds true at earlier times. Fernandez will use upgraded and new radio telescopes to image the gas reservoirs of these systems to better understand the processes taking place. This will yield important clues since gas provides the fuel for star formation, making it a key component in the evolution of galaxies. The educational component of the proposal consists of developing summer STEM courses as part of the Rutgers Future Scholars program with local public schools. This program selects local talented seventh graders and provides them with academic resources and mentoring to help them graduate from high school and be the first ones in their families to attend college. Fernandez seeks to measure the evolution of the atomic and molecular gas across cosmic time, and explore possible differences between the mergers and turbulent disks. She will study the evolution of ultra-luminous infrared galaxies using images of neutral hydrogen (HI). The first part of the study will use the COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey, an on-going survey being done at the Very Large Array that is expected to image 300 galaxies in the redshift interval 0 z 0.5. The second part will use data from the LADUMA (Looking At the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array) survey planned with the South African Square Kilometer Array precursor, which will measure the HI content out to z=1.4. The third part consists of observing a sub-sample of galaxies in CO with ALMA to compare its amount and distribution of molecular hydrogen to HI. The educational component consists of developing several STEM courses that will use astronomy as a gateway science to illustrate how astronomers use fields such as physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering to understand the Universe. In addition, Fernandez will plan activities open to families which will consist of both lecture/demonstration and observing. She will serve as a mentor and offer research opportunities to interested students.