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Astronomy Colloquium

Wednesday, January 12, 2022
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Online Event
Fast Transients, High Redshift Galaxies, and the Keck Wide-Field Imager
Jeff Cooke, Professor, Swinburne University,

I will discuss some recent results from the Deeper, Wider, Faster (DWF) program that coordinates over 80 telescopes at all wavelengths, including particle detectors, to search for fast transients with millisecond-to-hours duration. DWF discovered two new fast radio bursts (FRBs), along with hundreds of other fast transients, during a recent operational run and the simultaneous, fast-cadenced, wide-field multi-wavelength observations lend insight into the nature of FRBs. Secondly, I will touch upon work by our group on a powerful means that uses broadband imaging alone to glean spectroscopic and internal galaxy kinematic properties of Lyman break galaxies. That work has uncovered evidence of a nascent morphology-density relation at z ~ 2-3, an inherent population mass bias when using conventional investigations, and improved means for halo matching between observations and simulations, among other things. Finally, I will report on the status of the Keck Wide-Field Imager, a UV-sensitive wide-field optical imager for Keck under development. KWFI will play a key role in progressing the above research areas, along with science from the solar system, transients at all wavelengths, to the Epoch of Reionization. In addition, KWFI will enable science not possible on any other telescope, not even 30m telescopes, and will help keep Keck a leader in the era of 30m telescopes and mega-facilities at all wavelength.

To view this event via YouTube, please go to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-zYBv_IqFp2f9huYQA1VSw

For more information, please contact Jim Fuller by email at jfuller@caltech.edu or visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/.