Freeform post: Lyman-Alpha emitting glalxies

For this freeform post I am going to talk about one of my past experiences that definitely helped me decide to go into astrophysics. The summer before my junior year of high school, I participated in a summer program at UCSC called COSMOS (California State School for Math and Science). It was half a summer camp, half research experience, and a ton of fun. My group - or "cluster" - focused on Astronomy and Oceanography and for my final research project, my group worked on trying to find distant Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies. Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies are host, dusty, star-producing galaxies from the beginning of the universe. Lyman-alpha "blobs" are some of the largest objects in the universe, some are more than 300,00 light years across. They are called Lyman-alpha because newly forming stars emit high amounts of UV radiation which ionize hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen ions neutralize in an excited state, with the electron on a high energy level. Lyman Alpha photons are emitted when the electron returns to the first energy level. Those wavelengths are far enough away that they have been extremely red-shifted. Amazingly, they are red-shifted enough that they can be detected in visible light. We actually got to remotely control the Keck Telescope in Hawaii in order to take "masks" of the sky that look like this:

We then got to comb through hundreds of these masks, marking interesting objects as shown above. There were some very interesting objects such as binary stars and quasars detected (shown below).

But unfortunately, finding Lyman-alphas are very rare. They look like the image below:

We collectively looked through almost 500 masks and found only 4 Lyman-alpha galaxies (and I am proud to say I found the oldest and rarest one, though that was entirely luck).  We then analyzed the redshift of each galaxy to figure out how old they were and the results were amazing.

The one I found was 12.8 billion years old, which is pretty significant when compared to a 14 billion year-old-universe.  The galaxy's redshift of 6.4 didn't even fit on the accepted collective graph of all discovered Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies.

Ultimately, our research helped the leading professor (Dr. Raja Thakurta) congregate data on Lyman-alphas in order to have a more normalized understanding of these mysterious early galaxies from the beginning of our universe.

This experience caused me to take a position in an astronomy lab the next summer researching black holes, but I will talk about that in my next blog post.