One of the unprecedented discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope is that massive quiescent galaxies in the early Universe appear more massive with earlier and faster formation and quenching timescales than expected. My PhD research focuses on constraining the formation and quenching mechanisms of these extreme systems.
To do this, I am developing a new tool, Gordian, which perfoms joint photometric and spectroscopic morphological decompositions. With IFU data, this enables us to extract independent spectra for different components of a galaxy (e.g., a bulge and a disc) so that we can analyse the multi-component assembly of these galaxies.
Astronomers have used emission-line diagnostic plots to separate different astronomical sources of ionisation for decades. However, these diagnostics were orignally designed for unresolved observations, not for the spatially-resolved data that is common today. Shockwaves in the interstellar medium are particularly challenging to identify with these methods.
In my master's research, I developed a new 3D emission-line diagnostic tool to cleanly separate shock ionization from other sources. This method works for many different objects (protostellar jet, supernovae remnant and AGN jet) across a range of scales (sub-pc to kpc). As part as this work, I designed the Python Tool for Emission-line Ratio Observation (PTERO), which can visualise observational IFU emission-line data alongside theoretical shock models.
Supermassive black holes are known to correlate with many host-galaxy properties; however, the balance of internal processes (e.g., secular evolution) and external processes (e.g., galaxy mergers) in fuelling black hole growth is still debated.
To probe this, I devised a new kinematic disturbance parameter, $\Delta V_{\star-g}$ (pronounced DVSG"), to quantify the offset between stellar and gas kinematics of galaxies. When comparing the $\Delta V_{\star-g}$ values of a local sample of AGN to control galaxies, we found no difference between the two populations, perhaps suggesting that non-merger processes play an important role in fuelling supermassive black hole growth.