James Aguirre
Assistant Professor
My research aims
to understand the formation and
evolution of stars and galaxies, and
to place them in the context of
cosmology and the large scale
structure of the universe.
Towards this goal, I am involved in
the design and construction
of cutting edge millimeter-wave
and radio instrumentation and the
creation of data analysis for that
instrumentation.
Research Projects
Z-Spec is a moderate resolution grating spectrometer for detecting molecular lines in local ULIRGs and carbon monoxide (CO) in high redshift galaxies. It covers the entire 200 - 300 GHz (1.6 - 1.0 mm) atmospheric window with ~1000 km/s resolution. Z-Spec was fully commissioned during the spring of 2007 and observed routinely at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea until May of 2010. Beginning in October 2010, Z-Spec operated at the APEX telescope in Chile as a guest instrument, and will return to the CSO in early 2012.
Z-Spec has made a number of important discoveries, including a massive quantity of water surrounding a distant quasar and the determination of distance for gravitationally lensed dusty starburst galaxies.
This
material is based upon work
supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No.
0807990. Any opinions,
findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the
author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National
Science Founda
The Precision
Array to Probe the Epoch of Reionization
(PAPER)
is an instrument designed to detect
a signature of the first stars and
galaxies. It does this by
detecting the voids produced in
emission from neutral hydrogren
(HI) as these first stars ionize the
previously-neutral universe.
PAPER is an interferometer operating
from 100 - 200 MHz (near FM radio
frequencies); one of the antenna
stations is shown at left.
PAPER currently has a 32 antenna
test station operating in Green
Bank, West
Virginia and 64
antennas deployed at the SKA South
Africa site in the Karoo
Desert. We will
eventually deploy 128 antennas to the
South Africa site.
http://www.ska.ac.za/newsletter/issues/15/05.php
tion.
MUSTANG - a 3 mm bolometer array camera for the Green Bank Telescope.
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey. A 1.1 mm continuum survey of the First Quadrant of the Galactic Plane and selected fields in the Outer Galaxy.
Bolocam has also been used to search for distant, dust-enshrouded star forming galaxies. There are two deep fields, the Lockman Hole and COSMOS. The Lockman Hole maps are available from IPAC.
My thesis work was on TopHat, a balloon-borne telescope designed to measure anistropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation.