The origin of galaxies and proto-clusters

The first galaxies and clusters are largely hidden by interstellar dust from optical telescopes and are most easily found in submillimetre surveys, which detect the radiation from the dust. The Herschel ATLAS survey, which was led from Cardiff, is the largest submillimetre survey ever carried out and detected a large number of young galaxies at z>4, only 1.6 years after the Big Bang, including several proto-clusters. However, so far we have found about one third of the optical counterparts to the 500,000 submillimetre sources. We now have access to much deeper optical and near-infrared images, which will allow us to find the counterparts for a much larger fraction of the sources. The Ph.D. student will find these new counterparts, which will include many young galaxies and proto-clusters at z>4. We will then propose to use telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimetre Array and the James Webb Space Telescope to study the physics and chemistry of these important objects.

This project will start on 01/10/2018