Professor Claudia Scarlata

This group is working on the following projects that require MSI's computational and memory capabilities:

• Photons in Astrophysical Environments: This project uses a numerical radiation transfer code called RASCAS that simulates the propagation of photons in astrophysical environments. The goal of this project is to perform the radiation transfer of Lyman alpha photons in idealized galactic environments designed to match model constraints of real galaxies in effort to reproduce the observed Lyman alpha signal in these galaxies. This tests our current understanding of galaxies and make progress towards using the Lyman alpha signal to constrain galaxy properties. 
• Model Fitting to Galaxy Spectra: The second project uses a Monte Carlo sampler to perform model fitting to the spectra of roughly 40 local star forming galaxies. The researchers are fitting to roughly 140 spectra in total and are relying on parallelization across 60 cores to complete this project in a reasonable time span. The research goal is to infer the properties of outflows, or material expelled from galaxies following supernova explosions, in a large sample of local star forming galaxies to search for relationships between the outflows and galaxy properties. 
• Constraining the Reionization History via Symbolic Regression: The goal of this project is to find an analytical formula that describes reionization history. The project uses MSI to generate the 21cm signal images using the code SimFast and calculated the reionization history from these images. The equation best that best described the results was searched for via symbolic regression, a genetic programming package method.  
• The Blue Compact Dwarf Galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey: This new project will reconstruct the stellar population of galaxies with the spectral energy distribution fitting method using the code "BEAGLE."  
• Simulating Galaxies Post-Big Bang: This project uses MSI to simulate galaxies about a billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies’ positions on the sky contain information about reionization, the phase change when the universe transitioned from neutral to ionized, which is the phase of universe we live in today. However, key details of reionization are not yet well understood. By creating many realizations of these simulated galaxies with different input parameters, each simulation’s output observables can be compared to those of real data to learn which input parameters reflect reality.

• Euclid Space Telescope Uncertainties: This new project will quantify and minimize the systematic uncertainties facing the Euclid space telescope. It requires MSI resources to work with the extremely large simulations which are necessary in this project.