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Summer research project #2:
Searching for Lyman alpha emitters at high redshift in the DEEP2 and
DEEP3 redshift survey spectroscopic databases
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Students:  Nina Jansen (Castilleja School)
Mentor:    Katie McCormick (UCSC undergraduate)
Will also be working with:
           Raja GuhaThakurta (UCSC faculty)
           Marcin Sawicki (Saint Mary's University faculty
                          Halifax, Canada)

The project involves a search for and characterization of actively
star-forming galaxies at high redshift.  The galaxies in question
are so distant that they are seen at a time when the Universe was
less than a billion years old (it is nearly 14 billion years old
today).  The basic strategy is to look for serendipitous detections
of the Lyman alpha emission line in the DEEP2 and DEEP3 redshift
survey databases.  These data were obtained with the Keck telescope
in Hawaii and DEIMOS spectrograph.  The goal of the project is to
quantify the amount of star formation per unit volume during an
early phase in the history of the Universe.

The search for Lyman alpha is two pronged: an automated search
followed by visual verification.  The student will use existing
tools, within the IDL (Interactive Data Language) programming
package, and hopefully develop new ones.