2023 Project Description

piXedfitting galaxies in a cluster

Supervisors

Yen-Ting Lin
Find out more about supervisors on ASIAA website

Task Description and Goals

Galaxy clusters are like graveyards for galaxies -- galaxies get accreted into clusters and the majority will spend the rest of their lives in clusters. During the infall, tidal interactions usually will strip a fair amount of stars from the galaxies. These stars, not bound to any of the galaxies but to the cluster potential well, are known as intracluster stars, and they can be regarded as a fossil record of the cluster assembly. Observationally, it is rather challenging to determine the amount of the intracluster stars. We plan to use the software package piXedfit that our group developed to tackle this challenging subject. The goal of the project is to improve the capability of piXedfit so that it can conduct spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting of multiple galaxies simultaneously, which can then be applied to crowded galaxy fields such as the center of galaxy clusters, and develop a new way to measure the amount of intracluster stars.

Required Background

Strong coding capabilities in python and parallel computing.