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UCSC Science Internship Program: AST-03: Keck DEIMOS Coadded SBF Spectroscopy of M81 Dwarf Satellite
Program Duration (Virtual + In-person)
24/06/2024 - 10/08/2024
Final Presentation at SIP
SIP Presentation
American Astronomical Society 245th Meeting
I will be attending the 245th AAS Annual Meeting in January 2025, presenting an iPoster as our project's first author. The AAS is the largest annual astronomical society gathering.
A 10-week selective research program where I worked with 2 high school co-interns, undergraduate researchers, and Professor Puragra Guha Thakurta to analyze faint dwarfs.
Project Abstract:
We analyzed images obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images and spectra obtained with the Keck 2 10-m telescope and DEIMOS instrument of the partially resolved stellar population of three dwarf satellite galaxies of the massive spiral galaxy M81: KDG63, KK77, and F8D1. The spectra were obtained with the goal of measuring the line-of-sight velocity and chemical abundance of the dwarf galaxies. At the distance of M81 (D = 3.6 Mpc), individual old red giant branch stars are so faint that it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain meaningful spectra using even the world’s most powerful telescopes and spectrographs. Instead, we rely on the “co-added surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) spectroscopy” technique pioneered by Toloba et al. (2016a,b). This technique uses the fact that, in ground-based seeing conditions, the upward SBFs correspond to pixels that contain a higher-than-average number of luminous stars as a result of Poisson fluctuations. We design each DEIMOS mask to target these upward SBFs and then co-add the spectra of multiple slits to increase the spectral signal-to-noise ratio. On the HST imaging side of the data analysis, we use SExtractor-based source catalogs of stellar positions (RA, DEC) and apparent magnitudes in the F606W and F814W filters to construct radial stellar surface density profiles, while properly accounting for the rectangular shape of the HST image and CCD gaps, and color-magnitude diagrams as a function of projected distance from the center of the dwarf satellite galaxy.
This research was carried out under the auspices of the Science Internship Program (SIP) at the University of California Santa Cruz. Partial funding support was provided by the National Science Foundation and NASA/STScI.
