Automated Search for Lyman-alpha Emmitters in the DEEP3 Galaxy Redshift Survey

Victoria Dean

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school, however, that I became interested in astronomy. I had heard from other students at my school about the Science Internship Program, which gives research opportunities to high school students and is run by UC Santa Cruz Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor Raja GuhaThakurta. I discussed possible projects with Raja, who became my mentor, and ultimately decided on my project, a search for very distant galaxies, because I thought it would be exciting to look back in time. I continued my research for two years, completing most of it over two summers at UC Santa Cruz. During the first summer, my project focused on manual search, which was exciting because I discovered several new Lyman Alpha Emitters, the type of galaxy I was looking for. However, this process of manual search was quite time-consuming, so when I came back the next summer, I combined the project with my passion for efficiency and computer science and worked on an automated search algorithm … The goal of this project is to look back in time to observe objects in the early stages of the history of the universe. Astronomers can observe what occurred billions of years ago by looking out into the distant universe. The farther away an object is, the farther back in time we are observing, because the light emitted from objects takes more time to travel to us. Thus observing objects that are very distant is essentially looking back in time.