Collaborative Research: GOing GREEN at High Resolution - Spatially Deconstructing Environmental Quenching over 9 Billion Years

Principal Investigators (PIs) Rudnick and Wilson are investigating how star formation is suppressed (quenched) in galaxies residing in distant massive clusters. The team will apply new analysis techniques to images from The Gemini Observations of Galaxies in Rich Early ENvironments (GOGREEN) Survey. By correcting for the blurring effect of the earth’s atmosphere the new images will be sharp enough to see if galaxies quench from the inside-out, outside-in, or everywhere simultaneously, and how this depends on the location of the galaxy (near a cluster center or in the outskirts). PI Wilson will develop and host astronomy workshops at the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, emphasizing senses other than hearing e.g., “Smelling the Universe” and “Touching the Universe.” PI Rudnick will continue his year-long high school research program that includes a capstone mini-symposium at the University of Kansas. The team will use the Finite-Resolution Deconvolution (Firedec) code to robustly increase the resolution of their sub-arcsecond ground-based images by a factor of approximately 2.5 without requiring any morphological priors. They will use the resulting high resolution multi-color GOGREEN images to identify which regions of each galaxy have colors consistent with quenching, thus determining the mode (inside-out, outside-in, or everywhere simultaneously), and how this depends on environment and time since entering a cluster. The team will also measure the stellar mass profiles of galaxies identified as transitioning from star forming to passive to determine how the distribution of stellar mass within galaxies, and hence their morphology, changes as star formation quenches. All data products will be made publicly available. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.