Project A
Caught in the act: witnessing the formation of the most massive galaxy clusters across the cosmic time
Chian-Chou Chen (T.C.) & Fabrizio Arrigoni Battaia
A new type of object, nurturing the formation of massive galaxy clusters, has been freshly discovered. Explore with us a multi-wavelength dataset from cutting-edge facilities to unveil its properties.
In the local Universe, more than half of the baryonic masses reside in massive galaxy clusters - a spatial concentration of a group of hundreds of galaxies, each of which on average contains as many stars as there are in our Milky Way. Unlike our Milky Way, however, most of these galaxies are red-and-dead, not forming stars for over billions of years. The formation and evolution of these galaxies over the cosmic time remain challenging issues in the state-of-the-art galaxy formation models.
We have recently discovered a new type of object that appears to be the progenitor of the local massive clusters: the Enormous Lyman-Alpha Nebulae (ELAN). They are copiously emitting Hydrogen Lyman-alpha emission on unprecedentedly large scales. They host multiple active black holes (AGN) and galaxies that are undergoing extensive star formation. Our recent work suggest that indeed we have caught an early formation phase of the present day massive galaxy clusters.
To understand detailed physics of the formation, a student is invited to contribute to the characterization of ELAN. Specifically, the student will join our team in an exciting moment as we have collected a rich data set on one of our newly discovered ELAN from world-leading facilities such as MUSE on the VLT/ESO and ALMA. Potential projects include number counts of dust-obscured galaxies around this ELAN, estimating the star-formation rate and molecular gas mass of the AGN host galaxies embedded in the ELAN, and looking for any relation between the Lyman-alpha emission and the molecular gas emission.
#python #photometry #spectroscopy #ALMA #MUSE #APEX #galaxyclusters #ELAN
