Space Exploration

UNC Asheville Assistant Professor of Physics David Wake receives grant to use James Webb Space Telescope to search for distant galaxies

By UNC Asheville

August 15^th, 2023

Cover photo: NASA, ESA, CSA, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Marcia Rieke (University of Arizona), Daniel Eisenstein (CfA)

UNC Asheville Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy David Wake is on the search for distant galaxies.

With a new grant giving him and a global team of scientists access to hundreds of hours of observing time with the James Webb Space Telescope, he’ll have an unprecedented chance to gather new data about our universe.

As the grant’s primary investigator for the U.S. team, Wake is leading the way in the single largest project to ever take place using the James Webb Space Telescope, through a process called pure parallel observation. As the project progresses, UNC Asheville students will have the opportunity to become involved, as well, giving them the chance to use exciting new data in their research.

“Distant galaxies are everywhere,” Wake explained. “It doesn’t matter where you look, you’re going to find distant galaxies.”

By collecting data with Webb’s NIRISS camera whenever one of the telescope’s other three cameras are being used, regardless of where specifically they are pointing, Wake and his team hope to collect a large amount of data that will provide new insights into distant galaxies. Because these galaxies are so far away, and because of the amount of time it takes the light from those galaxies to reach us, Wake will effectively be looking back in time, into the early history of the universe.

UNC Asheville Assistant Professor of Physics David Wake

“One of the things that we can do is look at the environment that the galaxies live in. We find very isolated galaxies, and then we find galaxies in these huge clusters where there may be several hundred very massive galaxies all bound together by their gravity,” Wake explained. “We know that environment affects how those galaxies evolve in time, and so in order to characterize that environment, you need big samples covering big volumes of space. This is something we can do that's pretty unique to this survey.”

In addition to taking images of the galaxies, Wake and his team will also collect spectra, spreading light out into separate wavelengths–similar to creating a rainbow by refracting light through a prism–and collecting very specific measurements from each wavelength.

“That gives you huge amounts of information. Spectroscopy is how we learn most of what we know in astronomy, through these very careful measurements,” Wake said. “For galaxies it can tell you how fast they're forming stars and so how fast they're growing. It can tell you how many heavy elements they have. By studying how those heavy elements are distributed and how that changes with time, you can learn about how their populations of stars are changing with time. One of the key things it gives us is very simple and very important: it gives us the distance to the galaxy."

Illustration of the Webb telescope, where the mirrors and instruments are positioned. Credit: Northrop Grumman

While Wake expects to start receiving data this fall, the project itself will span over the course of several years.

“James Webb is new, and what we're doing in this parallel set of observations is even newer, so there’s quite a lot of work to turn the real data you get from the telescope into something useful,” Wake said. “That's the main focus of the project.”

In the future, Wake plans to bring UNC Asheville students into the project to conduct undergraduate research using the data collected. Together they’ll work to learn how galaxies form, evolve, and change over time, and how the formation of galaxies may be linked to the distribution of dark matter in the universe.

“One of the things we're going to do with this data is a clustering analysis, and start linking the properties of the galaxies to the properties of the dark matter halos that they live in.”

And who knows what else they might discover along the way?

“This is a huge data set. There will be many things that we haven't even thought of that we’ll be able to do with it.”

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