FLASH Talks: Jaclyn Champagne (Steward Observatory) & TBA ()

Friday, 17 March 2023 noon — 1 p.m. MST

NOIRLab Headquarters | 950 North Cherry Ave., Tucson, AZ 85719

FLASH Talks
Jaclyn Champagne (Steward Observatory) & TBA ()
Jackie Champagne, University of Arizona
The Hunt for Galaxy Overdensities around the Earliest Quasars
The studies of rare, ultraluminous z>6 quasars hosting supermassive black holes of log(M_BH) > 8-9 M_sun often operate under the assumption that these objects reside in the rarest and most massive dark matter halos, supported by both observation and theory. Consequently, one might expect that quasars live in overdense regions of the cosmic web evidenced by an enhanced number of galaxies in their immediate vicinities. However, the data thus far has been inconclusive, owing largely to cosmic variance, small area surveys, and redshift uncertainty, in addition to one key unknown: if the galaxy overdensities exist, what are their physical properties and how do we trace them? In this talk, I will present a series of studies searching for overdensities around z~6-7 quasars using ALMA and HST to study photometrically both the dust-obscured and UV luminous populations of galaxies in quasar fields. I will also discuss two ongoing programs using JWST and wider-field ALMA imaging and spectroscopy to study the environments of a similar population of quasars and better constrain their protocluster-scale clustering with unprecedented precision and resolution.

Speaker 2 TBA, Afilliation
Title TBA
Abstract TBA