| Website | https://jwuphysics.github.io |
| Pronouns | he/him/his |
In case you missed it: HST + JWST imaging of VV 191, which comprises an elliptical (left) and spiral galaxy (right). The dust in the spiral appears to be backlit by the elliptical, although that's partly a "contrast" effect -- the red-brown tint of dust is more visible up against the bright elliptical galaxy.
There are also some amazing bonus background galaxies here, including a strongly lensed red source near the elliptical galaxy (at the 11 o' clock position).
Just in time for spooky season -- here's a newly released JWST MIRI image of the Pillars of Creation!
This false-color image shows gas and dust in a star forming region at mid-infrared wavelengths of 7.7, 10, and 15 microns!
Check it out here: https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-053
The new paper "3D-DASH: The Widest Near-Infrared Hubble Space Telescope Survey" now shows 1.4 square degrees of near-infrared imaging with HST!
Check out some massive star-forming galaxies they found!
The 3D-Drift And SHift (3D-DASH) program is a \textit{Hubble Space Telescope} WFC3 F160W imaging and G141 grism survey of the equatorial COSMOS field. 3D-DASH extends the legacy of HST near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy to degree-scale swaths of the sky, enabling the identification and study of distant galaxies ($z>2$) that are rare or in short-lived phases of galaxy evolution at rest-frame optical wavelengths. Furthermore, when combined with existing ACS/F814W imaging, the program facilitates spatially-resolved studies of the stellar populations and dust content of intermediate-redshift ($0.5<z<2$) galaxies. Here we present the reduced F160W imaging mosaic available to the community. Observed with the efficient DASH technique, the mosaic comprises 1256 individual WFC3 pointings, corresponding to an area of 1.35 deg$^2$ (1.43 deg$^2$ in 1912 when including archival data). The median $5σ$ point-source limit in $H_{160}$ is 24.74 mag. We also provide tools to determine the local point spread function (PSF), create cutouts, and explore the image at any location within the 3D-DASH footprint. 3D-DASH is the widest \textit{HST}/WFC3 imaging survey in the F160W filter to date, increasing the existing extragalactic survey area in the near-infrared at HST resolution by an order of magnitude.
One of the rather ridiculous things about UDGs and other low surface brightness galaxies (including some dwarf galaxies that I study) is that... they're transparent!!!
This zoomed-in Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a number of spiral galaxies *behind* the GAMA 526784.
Check out GAMA 526784! It's an "ultra-diffuse galaxy" (UDG), which basically means that its stellar populations are spread out over a very large volume. That means that they tend to be quite dim and hard to spot.
UDGs tend to have older stellar populations, and a sizeable contingent of globular clusters. But this one seems to have some blue star-forming regions!
Check out the image release: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2002/hubble-views-a-galactic-oddity
Here we see Hickson Compact Group 88, a quartet of galaxies that are surprisingly chilled out given how crowded their environment has become!
Usually these galaxy interactions are stressful events, and here we see some evidence of galaxy evolution: the two northern galaxies are flinging away some of their older (redder) stars. But the two southern galaxies seem to be quite undisturbed!
I happened to be sharing this with a collaborator, but might as well also share it here too!
If you know a bit about #astronomy but are looking to learn more about #DataVisualization and/or #MachineLearning, take a look at these tutorials: https://github.com/jwuphysics/ism-star-ml
Using a dataset of galaxies, we try to estimate how much cool gas it contains -- which is necessary for it to form new stars and grow.
The first notebook goes through some classical machine learning algorithms like decision trees and polynomial regression. The second notebook covers convolutional neural networks.
Just wanted to share this sweet image of NGC 765, a barred spiral galaxy with beautifully extended spiral arms.
