Rachana Bhatawdekar

    Astronomer

     

    Main Research Fields

    My scientific interests lie in the formation and evolution of galaxies in the first billion years after the Big Bang. I am particularly interested in using the magnification effect caused by gravitational lensing to find and study the faintest and most distant galaxies responsible for the reionization of the Universe. I study these galaxies using imaging from the Hubble space telescope, the Spitzer space telescope, the ground-based Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope and soon with Euclid. As a member of the James Webb Space Telescope Guaranteed Time Observations team, I plan to probe galaxy evolution with galaxy stellar mass functions, UV luminosity functions, star formation rates and UV spectral slopes.


    Keywords

    • High redshift galaxies

    • First stars, First galaxies, Reionisation

    • Galaxy formation and evolution

    • Mass functions, Luminosity functions, Star formation rates, Stellar masses, UV spectral slopes

    • Multiwavelength photometry catalogs, SED fitting, Photometric redshifts

    • Gravitational Lensing

    Ongoing collaborations

    • Webb Medium Deep Fields (WMDF) JWST GTO program. (PI: Rogier Windhorst, Arizona State University, USA)
    • CEERS ERS program (PI: Steven Finkelstein, University of Texas at Austin, USA)
    • JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) (PI: M. Rieke and P. Ferruit)
    • Member of JWST NIRSpec Instrument commissioning team 
    • Member of Euclid Consortium

    Publications

    Publications list: NASA ADS

    Project/mission at ESA

    HST, JWST, Euclid