Steven Furlanetto
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Galaxies in the very early universe turn out to be brighter and more common than astronomers expected. Detailed observations show further surprises: growing black holes, runaway star formation, galaxies that have already stopped forming stars, and unusual populations of stars.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
- Topics
galaxy formation
early universe
high-redshift galaxies
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Develop an easily parameterized analytic model of bursty star formation in early-universe galaxies and explore how this burstiness shapes their chemical evolution.
- Incorporate accreting black holes into the galaxy model to constrain the processes governing the origin and growth of the earliest galaxies.
- Build and publicly release a Bayesian hierarchical inference pipeline that compares observations of early galaxies object by object with fast, flexible theoretical models to constrain key parameters of galaxy formation.
More about the research
Explaining these findings requires physical models of early galaxies and a fair way to compare those models with the data.
Why it matters
This basic science work aims to explain why early galaxies look so different from what theory predicted, clarifying how stars, chemical elements and black holes built up during Cosmic Dawn. The public inference pipeline could help astronomers get more out of existing observations of distant galaxies and plan future surveys.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Philip Hopkins
California Institute of Technology, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Develop new theoretical models of gas inflow onto supermassive black holes, in which strong magnetic fields dominate the accretion disk and change its behavior.
Katherine Whitaker
University of Massachusetts, MA·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Map large statistical samples of massive galaxies and their environments across cosmic history using the Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope.
Kate Rowlands
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Map recent star-formation histories in nearby galaxies using full spectral fitting of KILOGAS data, and compare them with current interstellar gas to see how star formation depends on available gas.
The school
University of California-Los Angeles: 84 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 803 research doctorates a year.
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