Much of Rachel Bezanson’s professional career in astronomy has revolved around data collected from the Hubble Space Telescope, but soon she'll have a new, larger data pool to explore. The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope launched this Sunday, and with it the hope of a greater understanding of our universe and beyond.
Bezanson, an observational astronomer, says that while Hubble was a good starting point for her and others' research, she sees the Roman Telescope as a massive leap forward.
“I think of Roman as like taking the blinders off; its huge field of view will give us the ability to really not just look for trends in what we do happen to see in a small slice of the Universe but actually quantify the trends that really exist in the universe. It's pretty exciting.”
Her research revolves around studying the formation of galaxies, how galaxies turn off their star-formation, and the general evolution of galaxies both current and early. She has been part of many large galaxy surveys over the years, including being a Survey Scientist for the LEGA-C (Large Early Galaxy Astrophysics Census) ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey, which looked at roughly 3,000 galaxies in our universe.
With the Roman Telescope, Bezanson is looking to use the bigger picture to zoom in on galaxy formations.
“One of the primary questions that I'm looking to answer in my research, and the members of my group are looking to answer, is: how and why and when do the biggest galaxies in the universe form and how do they grow?”
Bezanson isn’t alone in her quest for answers; in fact, a vast majority of the research she conducts is done by her students.
One such student, Lauren Elicker, has already been working on the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) survey. The PFS survey uses a Prime Focus Spectrograph instrument that is on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, which measures where galaxies are and how fast they’re moving. This helps scientists understand how the universe is expanding and what dark energy is. Elicker is interested in figuring out the properties of galaxies as well as super-massive black holes, and Bezanson says Elicker will likely use a combined data set from the PFS survey and Roman to “quantify that connection of what black holes live inside of what galaxies and how that changes over time.”
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope launched early on Sunday morning. Several other astronomers at Pitt are working on funded research and helped with the preparations for the launch, which you can read about here.