Brant Robertson
University of California-Santa Cruz, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
How did galaxies get their shapes, and what does a galaxy's form reveal about the physics that built it? Answering this needs shape measurements for enormous numbers of galaxies.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Computer Science
Physics
- Topics
galaxy morphology
galaxy formation
galaxy evolution
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Incorporate the Morpheus deep learning framework, which classifies images pixel by pixel, into the Rubin Science Platform for analyzing Rubin Observatory data.
- Validate Morpheus segmentation, source detection and morphological classification using a combination of Rubin and space-based imaging.
- Apply Morpheus to initial LSST data releases to produce probabilistic morphologies for large numbers of galaxies.
- Use Morpheus morphologies to investigate correlations between galaxy shape and other galaxy properties, to probe the physics of galaxy formation.
More about the research
New sky surveys will produce far more images than people or traditional software can handle. This project uses artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to make galaxy morphology, the study of galaxy shapes and structures, measurable across huge public imaging surveys.
Why it matters
Coming sky surveys will be too large to analyze without automated tools. An open, validated AI tool for galaxy morphology could let astronomers measure the shapes of vast numbers of galaxies across many surveys. This would make it easier to test how galaxies form and could lower the barrier for applying machine learning to astronomical data.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elizabeth Jeffery
California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Obtain follow-up spectra of star-forming galaxies in known supercluster filaments, and compare their stellar ages, colors and redshifts with estimates from Rubin images alone; use the spectra to compute how long galaxies take to fall into clusters.
Dennis Zaritsky
University of Arizona, AZ·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure the reddening of thousands of faint background sources projected near 25 nearby galaxies, using extremely deep images, to estimate how much dust surrounds each galaxy.
Gary Bernstein
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Measure precise astrometric positions of stars in hundreds of thousands of Dark Energy Camera images from the Blanco Telescope, collected over 12 years.
The school
University of California-Santa Cruz: 15 labs on PI Pages, $218M a year on research, 183 research doctorates a year.
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