2011-05-06

star formation, CMB at high ells

Guangtun Zhu (NYU) successfully defended his PhD today. He did much of the spectral extraction and analysis for the enormous PRIMUS survey, which has more than 105 good redshifts but was done in 39 nights of Magellan time with a small team. He also can show clearly that about 15 percent of the galaxies on the red sequence in fact have active star formation, and many other things. It was a pleasure, and congratulations Dr Zhu!

In the afternoon, Lyman Page (Princeton) talked about the current and future of CMB experiments. He talked quite a bit about the promise for secondary anisotropies and the gravitational wave background, but the thing that blew me away was the ACT and SPT data he showed: There are clearly 5 peaks in the spherical fourier transform and two more if you squint. It is absolutely incredible. At very high ells they are dominated by dusty galaxies (and their systematics are non-trivial), which also is extremely interesting for the future of galaxy astrophysics.

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