| NSF Org: |
AST Division Of Astronomical Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 17, 2014 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | July 30, 2019 |
| Award Number: | 1412503 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Richard Barvainis
AST Division Of Astronomical Sciences MPS Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences |
| Start Date: | August 15, 2014 |
| End Date: | July 31, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $232,377.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $232,377.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO ALBUQUERQUE NM US 87131-0001 (505)277-4186 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
NM US 87131-0001 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
EXTRAGALACTIC ASTRON & COSMOLO, EPSCoR Co-Funding |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.049 |
ABSTRACT
One of the principal unsolved problems in modern astrophysics is the formation and evolution of galaxies. Astronomers wish to understand when galaxies first emerge, how star formation changes over the history of the universe, as well as the physical constituents of galaxies. This award will resolve long-standing questions about galaxy evolution by performing a massive survey of the neutral hydrogen gas of hundreds of galaxies over the past 4.6 billion years.
The survey, named CHILES (the COSMOS HI Large Extragalactic Survey), takes advantage of an enormous program with NSF's Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes to observe a section of the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) field. Over 1,000 hours of VLA observing time have been granted, and the CHILES survey will be the first to provide details on the neutral gas distribution and kinematics for individual galaxies over several billion years of cosmic evolution. The data and associated products will be made available to the public, providing a legacy dataset for the entire astronomical community.
This collaborative award will also provide funding for six graduate students across the United States, creating a new cohort of skilled radio astronomers. Finally, the research team will incorporate the results of the survey into their general astronomy classes and in their numerous public outreach presentations.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The purpose of this project has been to carry out the first true deep radio observations to explore the evolution of the gas content of galaxies, specifically neutral hydrogen (HI), over the past 4.6 billion years of cosmic evolution. To carry out this project, we observed one patch of the sky, the so-called COSMOS field, staring for 1000 hours with the Jansky Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, in New Mexico. The resulting data were complex, and pushed the envelope of current data reduction techniques for these kinds of observations. The team designed a fully automated pipeline to reduce the data without user intervention, optimized the imaging of the data, and scientifically explored the first 300 hours of data, and prepared for science to be done with the full 1000 hours of data. Even before the full data had been considered, the survey broke the record for the most distant galaxy ever mapped using the emission from HI, finding an unusually gas-rich galaxy. It also looked at the shapes of galaxies in overdense regions of the Universe, as revealed by HI observations, and showed that galaxies can be detected in this way, even in the presence of man-made radio emission.
At the University of New Mexico, we focused our efforts on characterizing the kinds of galaxies that can be found by the survey, with an emphasis on the most massive galaxies in HI. We created artificial galaxies of known characteristics, and inserted them into the real data cubes. With these, we studied how well we can find galaxies in the data by searching by eye, compared to using an automatic galaxy finding algorithm. This work is important not only for the CHILES project, but also for future large surveys of HI to be done with new telescopes which have been built partially with this purpose in mind.
The broader impacts of our work focus on the aforementioned development of new tools that will be useful for future large astronomical surveys, including the use of artificial sources to characterize survey performance, and the training of a new and diverse group of astronomers. The UNM graduate student who worked on this project has made presentations in English and Spanish, and has used this work as part of her PhD dissertation.
Last Modified: 10/31/2020
Modified by: Patricia A Henning
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