Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Galaxies are host to the stars and planets and are the building blocks of structure in our Universe. We are residents of the Milky Way, a relatively massive galaxy which means developing a firm understanding of how massive galaxies form and evolve is essential for understanding humankind's place in the cosmos. In the last decade, the majority of data we have collected to study galaxy growth has come from large aperture ground-based observatories. While extremely sensitive to detecting distant galaxies, they provide poor spatial resolution as the blurring effect of the Earth's atmosphere is severe. Therefore the majority of measurements of the galaxy population we have made are "unresolved", that is, we measure the total mass of galaxies, but we do not easily measure how the mass is distributed within the galaxy. The lack of this spatial information means that ascertaining the physics of how mass growth occurs is challenging. But things are changing. In December 2021 the James Webb Space Telescope launched. JWST has exquisite sensitivity and high angular resolution giving us access to resolved multicolour imaging of distant galaxies. As a member of the science team of NIRISS, the instrument built by Canada, I have access to significant amounts of proprietary JWST data that my team will be using to make the most advanced measurements ever made of the resolved buildup of stellar mass in galaxies over cosmic time. I also serve as Project Scientist for GIRMOS, an ambitious, multi-object IFU spectrograph that is fed with adaptive optics and is being built by a Canadian consortium using CFI and provincial funding. Adaptive optics uses deformable mirror technology in tandem with high-performance computing to correct for the blurring effect of the atmosphere. In the second half of the project we will be developing the tools to analyze the large projects undertaken by GIRMOS and applying these to the first-light data to make the first resolved kinematic, metallicity and star-formation maps of galaxies - enhancing the picture of their buildup over cosmic time. Lastly, over the past 5 years, I have been working on image deconvolution algorithms that effectively take the blurring effect of the Earth's atmosphere out of astronomical imaging data post-facto and applying them to ground-based datasets. We are now developing software that will be able to do this for extremely large ground-based datasets that will increase the sample of 1000's of galaxies studied by JWST and GIRMOS, to billions of galaxies.  Long term, deconvolution is a potential game-changer for this field. This three-pronged approach to provide mappings of the mass growth and star formation rates of large samples of galaxies over >90% of cosmic time develops new technology and new techniques. From these maps we will have the potential to watch galaxies like the Milky Way "growing up" over most of their lifetime and address key questions on how our Galaxy, and ultimately how we, came to be.