Free Form: IRAS08339+6517

One month ago, I found out that I had been accepted to do research at the Charlottesville site of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.  As if that weren't exciting enough, the topic of research was something I actually found really exciting.

My mentor for the summer spent his grad school years researching the evolution of high-redshift galaxies.  This summer, we'll be researching a galaxy, IRAS08339+6517, which is at a redshift of about z=.02, about 80 megaparsecs away.  The galaxy is currently undergoing high amounts of star formation, and the project aims to answer the following questions:

• What causes star formation?  Is it mergers of different galaxies?  Accretion from the inter-galactic medium?
• Is the formation spread out across the entire galaxy or restricted to certain locations?
• Is there an Active Galactic Nucleus, and, if so, how does it influence the rate of star formation?

Astronomers have already found a lot of data on this galaxy.  For example, it's at an RA of 8 hours and 38 minutes, with a declination of $65^o$ and 7 minutes.  Its radial velocity (it's velocity away from our line of sight) is 5730 km/s.  They've taken spectra of the galaxy.

Both from the NED database

We'll be observing in the far infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.  We'll be taking more spectra of the galaxy and using them to determine the chemical composition of the stars being formed.  From that, we'll hopefully be able to figure out where most of the stars are coming from.

We're studying this particular galaxy because it's the perfect compromise between being really far away (so the information we're getting from studying it is actually hundreds of thousands of years old) but close enough that we can get good data.  When we answer the questions above and others like them, we'll have a better idea of what star formation was like closer to the big bang.  We're not exactly sure what we'll find, but we know that it's not going to be the same as the processes of star formation in nearby galaxies.