School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Physics and Astronomy

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Extragalactic Astronomy

Tufts University research in astrophysics is led by Professors Danilo Marchesini and Anna Sajina. Both are primarily observers in the field of extragalactic astronomy, although they closely collaborate with theorists. The main goals of their research activities is to understand:

  1. how galaxies formed after the Big Bang and how their properties have changed with cosmic time,
  2. what physical processes are responsible for the inferred changes in the galaxies' properties,
  3. the co-evolution between the host galaxy and its central super-massive black hole, and
  4. the dusty phases of galaxy formation and black hole growth.

Research in these areas involve faculty, postdocs, visitors, graduate and undergraduate students. To pursue their science goals, Tufts astronomers, faculty, and students make use of many of the world's leading space- and ground-based observational facilities, including the Hubble, Spitzer, and Herschel space telescopes, the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray satellites, the W.M. Keck Observatory, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) VLT, the Subaru telescope, the Gemini Observatory, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The Tufts Astronomy Group is a member of the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) survey collaboration. This provides access to state-of-the-art spectroscopic data for millions of galaxies allowing an unprecedented 3D view of galaxies distribution in space. This both allows us to study the dark matter dominated cosmic web and to study how galaxy properties are affected by where they are in this web.

Research Faculty

Danilo Marchesini is an expert of statistical studies of galaxy populations (i.e., luminosity and stellar mass functions), of ground- and space-based extragalactic surveys (optical and near/mid infrared), or construction of multi-wavelength photometric catalogs, and of detailed studies of distant massive galaxies through, e.g., ground- and space-based imaging and spectroscopic follow-up programs. Danilo Marchesini is a key member of several multi-wavelength surveys, including MUSYC, NMBS, NMBS-II, 3D-HST, KIFF, HFF-DeepSpace, and UltraVISTA.

Anna Sajina is an expert on mid-infrared active galactic nuclei (AGNs) selection as well as infrared AGN-starburst decomposition, spectral energy distribution modeling including photometric redshift determination. She also has an interest in machine learning methods applied to galaxy evolution studies (for example the new SurveySim code developed at Tufts). Anna Sajina is a key member of the Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS) and the DeepDrill survey.