Rubin + Roman:

Project Background/Intro

In the fall of 2022, I joined Prof. Keith Bechtol's research group with an interest in using new tools for Cosmic probes of Dark Matter to constrain Cosmological Models. He introduced the idea of a project based on a paper from Troxel et al.which presents and validates 20 deg^2 of overlapping synthetic imaging surveys which represent the full depth of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope High-Latitude Imaging Survey (HLIS) and five years observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST).

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, seeing in the optical range from the ground, offers an opportunity to gain a wide and deep view into the universe and identify more objects than the total amount of objects identified in all previous surveys combined. Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, on the other hand, views in the near-infrared and has a much finer angular resolution since it avoids viewing through Earth's turbulent atmosphere. Combining the fine PSF (high resolution) of Roman with the depth and magnitude of Rubin offers a lot of opportunities to improve galaxy-star classification, identification of ultra-faint high-redshift galaxies and stellar streams, and more cosmic probes for dark matter.

Results (So far!)

I will post plots which I created in the coming weeks.
Prof. Bechtol's team, in collaboration with others at the University of Chicago, Fermilab, University of California-San Diego, New York University, Northwestern University, and many more, have posted a White Paper building on the work from this project to advocate for use of the Rubin Observatory and Roman Space Telescope as described in the abstract (and Introduction section of this page). Plots and a link to the White Paper will be added soon!

Next Steps

Since I have been away at my CIERA REU, I will spend some time catching up on what the team has done, recalibrating my work, and building on some of the progress we have done! I will continue making diagnostic plots to compare the power of Rubin with and without the help of Roman to better understand how the two work together and how they can support new scientific discoveries and probes of Dark Matter.