Driving Community Learning at Cosmic Scales: Defining Ultrafaint Dwarf Galaxies & Radical Mentorship Methods

Understanding the earliest moments of our Universe continues to be largely elusive, particularly with respect to dark matter and the formation of the first stars and galaxies. Ultrafaint dwarf galaxies (UFDs) can help us answer some of these cosmic mysteries as they are believed to be the first galaxies to ever form. A researcher and her team at California State University, San Bernadino, has been awarded a Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascending Faculty Catalyst (AFC) Award to study UFDs in an effort to learn more about galaxy formation, galaxy evolution, and cosmology early in the history of the Universe. A related project will involve studies of stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way (MW). For over a century, astronomers have used various distance measurement methods to construct a Cosmic Distance Ladder with RR Lyrae (RRL) stars in the MW constituting the closest rung. Recent technological advances have created incredibly large data sets of RRL observations. RRL are not only used as distance indicators, but through their radial velocities, they can be tools to measure the MW’s mass. This Award will also enable the creation of a two-year mentorship education curriculum for the Cal-Bridge Program, a California state-wide STEM scholarship program. Numerous STEM-education based reports highlight the importance of mentorship in broadening the participation of students in historically underrepresented groups in STEM and an equal importance on mentors being educated in mentorship. Over the course of the AFC award, previously acquired spectroscopic data from five UFDs will be analyzed to measure metallicities and chemical abundances towards better understanding the scatter in the low stellar mass end of the Stellar Mass-to-Metallicity Relation. By combining the newest large observational datasets, the researchers also plan to create the largest, most accurate RRL 6-dimensional phase space coordinate data table with period-luminosity calibrated radial velocities. This will be employed in an effort to more accurately measure the mass of the Milky Way. In addition, the principal investigator will create and run a trial of a two-year long Cal-Bridge Mentorship Education curriculum consisting of two in-person workshops, and four virtual workshops. 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.