Rachel Bazanson is an Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, She is an observational astronomer and is broadly interested in empirical studies of massive galaxies, both today and in the early Universe. Her research relies on a variety of ground and space-based telescopes (e.g., Keck, Blanco, HST, MMT, VLT, Lick, ALMA, and Gemini telescopes). Rachel has been involved with a number of large galaxy surveys spanning from the local Universe to a few billion years after the Big Bang including the NMBS, 3D-HST, and OBEY surveys as well as smaller spectroscopic surveys. She is a Survey Scientist for the LEGA-C (Large Early Galaxy Astrophysics Census) ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey, which is an extraordinarily deep spectroscopic survey of ~3000 galaxies at a lookback time equal to half of the age of the Universe. Looking towards the future, Rachel is also actively involved in planning for the Subaru PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph) Galaxy Evolution spectroscopic survey of distant galaxies and am leading a Treasury program in the first year of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her research aims to disentangle and interpret the morphological, structural, and dynamical evolution of massive galaxies through cosmic time. Very generally, Rachel is interested in understanding how and when galaxies form, how star-forming galaxies turn off - or “quench” - their star-formation, and the physical processes that drive the evolution of early galaxies into the bimodal and well-behaved galaxy populations observed in the local Universe.
Title: The beginning of the end - charting the emergence and evolution of massive galaxies
Abstract: Galaxies are extraordinarily complex collections of stars, gas, and dark matter. The largest galaxies, although relatively rare in number, host many of the stars in the Universe and deep in their cores harbor the most extreme supermassive black holes. Today massive galaxies are old - their stars are red and dead and their dynamical structures are dispersion supported. While massive galaxies have long been expected to be relics of a much earlier formation time, JWST is just now revealing their earliest histories, including their formation hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang. In this talk I will describe my team’s observational efforts to identify and characterize massive galaxies in the distant Universe with JWST and throughout cosmic time, including with the new Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph.