Tracing the circumgalactic gas flows around quasars in emission and absorption at intermediate redshift

To grow to their incredibly large sizes, galaxies need to accumulate material from their surrounding medium. It is the gas that surrounds galaxies that provides the raw material to create stars and to fuel the growth of black holes. This program will detect the gas that surrounds galaxies and advance our understanding of how galaxies grow. The investigators will analyze data obtained with a new generation of astronomical instruments. The program will support the training of a postdoctoral scholar. This program will also enter a partnership with the Wolverine Pathways program at the University of Michigan. Wolverine Pathways is a well-established program that offers college preparation and academic development opportunities made available to every student in middle and high school in the Metro Detroit area. On long timescales, gas flows from the intergalactic and circumgalactic medium (IGM/CGM) are thought to fuel galaxy and Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) growth. Energy and momentum released by quasars and young stellar populations couple to the interstellar medium to regulate gas cooling while expelling metals to intergalactic space. The IGM and CGM serve as reservoirs to fuel galaxy evolution while also containing a record of past feedback. The advent of wide-field integral field spectrographs (IFS) available on large telescopes revolutionized our ability to directly image IGM/CGM flows in emission, providing unique 3D (2 spatial + velocity) information along with critical spectral diagnostics of density, temperature, and even metallicity. This program will leverage wide-field IFS observations of 10 to 100 kpc scale flows around 84 archival quasars and 30 new ones at z = 0.2 to 1.5 to study galaxy and SMBH feeding and feedback during the period of “cosmic dusk,” over which star formation and quasar activity declined dramatically from their peak at z = 2 to 3. All datacubes analyzed for the program and corresponding catalogs 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.