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  • 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

    ADS record

    SFACT

    1. 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
    2. 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)
    3. 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

    1. 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

    1. Melissa J. Brucker, Kristie A. Nault, Mark Hammergren, Jennifer Sieben, Geza Gyuk, and Michael R. Solontoi. “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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.

    Science Communication

    Physics Today

    Physics Today writing and editing is ongoing.

    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