About Us
The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) is an astronomical survey designed to probe the formation and evolution of galaxies as a function of both cosmic time (redshift) and the local galaxy environment. The survey covers a 2 square degree equatorial field with spectroscopy and X-ray to radio imaging by most of the major space-based telescopes and a number of large ground based telescopes. Over 2 million galaxies are detected, spanning 75% of the age of the Universe. COSMOS is led by Caitlin Casey, Jeyhan Kartaltepe, and Vernesa Smolcic and involves more than 200 scientists in a dozen countries. More information on the COSMOS team members can be found here.
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Spotlight
Nick Scoville receives the 2021 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship Prize
The 2021 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship, celebrating a career of eminence in astrophysical research, goes to our very own Nick Scoville (Caltech) for lifelong contributions to our understanding of molecular gas and star formation in the Milky Way and other galaxies, for visionary leadership, and for inspiring generations of early career astronomers.
Snakes and Butterflies
Imagine your eyes could see in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum and you went out and looked towards the constellation of Sextans, where the COSMOS field is located. You would be able to distinguish several weird shapes in the sky showing jets or lobes of radio emission, forming snakes, slugs, and butterflies. These extended radio Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) have the nickname FR-type radio galaxies.
The latest work by Vardoulaki et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10721) of FR-type radio AGN in COSMOS uses the data from the 3 GHz VLA-COSMOS survey (Smolčić et al. 2017) to investigate the physical properties of the sources, their host galaxies and the large scale environment in order to find links with the shapes they display in the radio sky.
You can read the publication here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10721
Relating mass and star formation rates
What's the relation between the mass of galaxies and their rate for star formation? The new paper by Sarah Leslie and collaborators measures this relation for 200,000 galaxies in the COSMOS field.
This relation between rate of star formation (SFR) and mass is called the main-sequence. It is observed across a large amount of cosmic time (redshifts). The paper by Leslie et al. provides a coherent measurement of this main-sequence up to redshift of 5 (about 13 billion years in the past). To do this, they use mean stacks of 3 GHz radio-continuum images to derive average SFRs for ∼ 200,000 mass-selected galaxies.
Check out her YouTube video explaining her paper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMNp4qXp0FM
