Farooq, Rameen: Assessing the Robustness of Emission Lines in the HETDEX Spectra

Title: Assessing the Robustness of Emission Lines in the HETDEX Spectra

Name: Rameen Farooq

Major: Physics

School affiliation: School of Arts and Sciences

Programs: Aresty Summer Science Program

Other contributors: Eric Gawiser, Adam Broussard, Elisabeth Turner

Abstract: Lyman alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs) have a strong connection to present-day galaxies, such as our very own Milky Way, and are thought to be the precursors of such modern galaxies. They are observed through strong radiation emitted from excited neutral hydrogen atoms. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) has already discovered over 100,000 LAEs that could very well represent an early phase in galaxy formation. However, the collected data still has the chance of containing spurious emission line detections caused by detector noise or systematics, requiring quality assessment to improve the robustness of the detections. Through the classification of emission lines in the HETDEX spectra, we are able to find common, overarching issues that lead to such false detections. By creating a variety of plots to visualize these issues, we found that a large portion of these spurious detections are actually emission lines from the night-time sky rather than distant galaxies. The information from this project can directly aid in the clustering of detected emission lines from the same source in the HETDEX spectra. Using the information gathered from LAEs in general, researchers will be able to infer the masses of their dark matter halos as well as the properties of the dark energy that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.