Astro Seminar Series - VIA ZOOM

Pauline Zarrouk did her PhD between October 2015 and 2018 at CEA-Saclay in France where she worked on the first clustering analysis of the eBOSS quasars using a sample of 2-years data taking in order to measure the cosmic distances and the growth rate of structures to constrain dark energy. In 2018, she joined the DESI collaboration and received the Women For Science fellowship. From January 2019 to September 2020, Pauline was a postdoc at the ICC at Durham University in the UK where she developed the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS) target selection pipeline and characterised the clustering properties of this sample of galaxies. Prof. Zarrouk has been the co-chair of the DESI BGS working group since September 2019 and is also developing new methods to extract cosmological information from both spectroscopic and photometric surveys. Since October 2020, she has been a staff researcher at LPNHE at Jussieu University in Paris.

Talk Title and Abstract:

The DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: from target selection to scientific analyses

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will measure redshifts for 20 millions of high redshift (z > 0.5) galaxies and quasars under dark time conditions using a 5000-fibre spectrograph on the 4-meter Mayall Telescope in the US. However, under lunar conditions that are too bright for good observations of these faint objects, DESI will observe a complete magnitude-limited survey of lower redshift galaxies (z<0.5 with a median z~0.2) called the Bright Galaxy Survey (BGS). The BGS sample of galaxies will be 1) two magnitudes fainter than the limit of the SDSS, 2) an order of magnitude larger than SDSS I and II, 3) the DESI’s densest galaxy sample to z~0.45.

In this talk, I will present the target selection, catalogue and clustering properties of the DESI BGS targets from the final release of the Legacy Imaging Surveys. Finally, I will mention examples of the science studies I am interested in with this sample and some other projects, from cosmological constraints to galaxy properties and their connection with the cosmic web.

Would you like to join this Zoom seminar?  Please email Donna Hayes.