Earth’s Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) from Space: A Story in Three Acts
- Joe Santanello w/PBL Working Group: ‘PBL Science, Community Building, and Influence at GSFC and Beyond’
- Jeff Piepmeier: ‘Investment: The Long Arc of Microwave Technology Development at GSFC’
- Rachael Kroodsma, Mark Stephen, Antonia Gambacorta, Fabrizio Gambini, Shawn Serbin: ‘Payoff: The Dawn of the Hyperspectral Microwave Era for PBL Science’
Rus Belikov (NASA/ARC), Chris Stark (NASA/GSFC)
In January 2023, the Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) kicked off the Coronagraph Design Survey, chartered to collect and document a broad range of coronagraph designs that may be applicable for NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The working group that conducted the Survey, led by Rus Belikov (ARC) and Chris Stark (GSFC), cast a very wide net capturing known and never-heard-of-before novel coronagraph designs. They have completed their 17-month study and will be delivering a final report to the HWO Technical Assessment Group (TAG). Come hear their public briefing of what they learned, and how the results of their survey help point the way to future direct imaging of Earth-like planets.
Dr. Mimi Hughes, Research Meteorologist, NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory
Shirley Ho (Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute)
In recent years, the fields of natural language processing and computer vision have been revolutionized by the success of large models pretrained with task-agnostic objectives on massive, diverse datasets (e.g. ChatGPT). These so-called "foundation models" have enabled transfer learning on entirely new scales, and have outperformed supervised training models across numerous problems. I will discuss the Polymathic AI initiative, a collaboration between researchers at the Flatiron Institute and scientists around the world. Polymathic AI is designed to spur scientific discovery using similar technology to that powering ChatGPT, we call it "Foundation Models". Using Polymathic AI, scientists will be able to model a broad range of physical systems across different scales.
Scott Carney and Jason Miklian
Jaclyn Champagne (Steward Observatory/University of Arizona)
After decades of photometric searches for galaxy overdensities around the luminous z>6 quasars that host 10^9 Msun supermassive black holes, JWST has revolutionized the scene through its wide-field grism capabilities. Now that quasar-anchored overdensities are routinely being uncovered spectroscopically, we can begin to connect our understanding of the earliest protoclusters to their descendant structures at lower redshifts. The JWST ASPIRE program targeted the sightlines of 25 quasars at z=6.5-6.8 with NIRCam imaging and wide-field slitless spectroscopy, efficiently discovering [OIII]+Hb emitting galaxies from z=5.3-7. Here I present the first detailed joint spectroscopic and imaging analysis of the richest protocluster candidate among these quasars using JWST + ALMA data. We examine the effect of the overdense environment on the evolution of galaxies within the filamentary overdensities, with particular attention to the difficulties in selecting AGN among the [OIII] emitters. In addition to a tentative overdensity of ``little red dots" with high [OIII]/Hb, we also find systematically suppressed specific star formation rates and older stellar population ages for galaxies situated in the densest filaments. I will also discuss the potential effects of photoionization from the central quasar within the proximity zone on the evolution of protocluster galaxies in its immediate environment.
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