Understanding the Stellar Populations of the First Galaxies

The core question this project will investigate is what the galaxy population in early cosmic epochs looks like, focusing on galaxies in the first 500 million years of the universe. To do this, there are two main parts to the project; creating a catalogue of early galaxy candidates, followed by characterising them.

To build up the catalogue of galaxies, data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be used. Not only will this help with the latter part of the project, but it will also help explore when the first galaxies formed. When the first galaxies formed is still an open question, and the catalogue should aid in determining when it happened.

The second part-characterising the galaxies-will be done using spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting on the obtained data, and by comparing the data to simulations. If possible, there will also be spectroscopic follow ups on some objects in the catalogue. One of the key characteristics this project will explore is the amount of dust in the

candidate galaxies, as dust is a tracer of the amount of metal (any element that isn't hydrogen or helium) in the galaxy. The earliest galaxies in the universe are thought to contain very little dust. Thus, if the galaxies this project finds are determined to have very little dust, it would mean observing truly primordial galaxies for the first time.