Thesis: Star Formation Across Cosmic Time
Dissertation Thesis, December 2022
AAS Dissertation Talk Slides, January 2023
SFACT (Star Formation Across Cosmic Time) is a novel large-scale narrow-band survey designed to detect emission-line galaxies in a range of redshift windows. These data can be used to study star-formation rates at multiple epochs simultaneously. Using the WIYN 3.5m telescope, this survey detects thousands of emission-line galaxies at nine distinct redshift windows up to z=1. It does this by targeting the Hα (λ6563), [O III] (λ5007), and [O II] (λ3727) emission lines with three custom narrow-band filters. Images are also taken with g, r, and i broad-band filters; all six filter images are combined to create deep images of each survey field. A custom pipeline has been developed to identify and measure objects of interest, resulting in a uniform selection of candidates across all narrow-band filters. Spectroscopic follow-up is also performed to confirm detections as emission-line galaxies. SFACT has detected objects ranging from H II regions in nearby galaxies to distant compact galaxies and quasars. A total of 12 fields spanning ∼6° are used in this study, for a total of 1134 targets with both imaging and spectroscopic data. Of these, 940 are star-forming galaxies discovered via one of our three primary emission lines and are used for star-formation rate density analysis.
My dissertation work includes analysis of the SFACT data in order to study star-formation rate densities of galaxies at z<1. This includes the processing of the images, the target selection, and the photometric measurements. A parallel project using previous star-formation studies is also analysed in order to more completely understand the observational biases inherent in emission-line surveys. Together, these two projects provide a valuable examination of the star-formation rate density of emission-line-selected galaxies at a wide range of lookback times.
Papers
SFACT
- Salzer, J. J., Carr, D. J., Sieben, J., et al., "The Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) Survey. I. Survey Description and Early Results from a New Narrow-Band Emission-Line Galaxy Survey", AJ, 2023
- Sieben, J., Carr, D. J., Salzer, J. J., et al., "The Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) Survey. II. The First Catalog of Targets from a New Narrow-Band Survey for Emission-Line Objects", AJ, 2023 (pdf)
- Carr, D. J., Sieben, J., Salzer, J. J., et al., "The Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) Survey. III. Spectroscopy of the Initial Catalog of Emission-Line Objects", AJ, 2023
Trojan Asteroids
- French, L. M., Stephens, R. D., Coley, D., Wasserman, L. H., and Sieben, J., "Rotation lightcurves of small jovian Trojan asteroids", Icarus, vol. 254, pp. 1–17, 2015.
Conference Posters and Talks
- Brucker, M. J., Nault, K. A., Hammergren, M., Sieben, J., Gyuk, G. Solontoi, M. R. “Preliminary Light Curve Results of NEOs from the Characterization and Astrometric Follow- Up Program at Adler Planetarium” American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #47. November (2015): #307.07.
- Sieben, J., Salzer, J., Carr, D. J. “The SFACT Survey - Star Formation Across Cosmic Time” American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #233. January (2019): #144.04.
- Sieben, J., Salzer, J., Van Sistine, A., Gronwall, C. “Luminosity Functions Derived from Three Distinct Emission Line Selected Galaxy Samples” American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #235. January (2020): #208.06.
- Sieben, J.,“Star Formation Across Cosmic Time (SFACT) survey” American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #241. January (2023): #427.04D.
- Kimsey-Miller, B., Salzer, J., Brunker, S., Carr, D., Sieben, J. “Exploring the Environments of SFACT Star-forming Galaxies ” American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #243. January (2024): #306.15.
Science Communication
Physics Today
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ScIU - Science Communication at IU
ScIU author page, 20+ articles written
Podcasts
Starts With A Bang #57 - The Universe's Newborn Stars, June 12, 2020