I used to be really fascinated with astronomy as a child and watched PBS shows on the topic, and it helped me build my interest in going into it. In general, it’s a really interesting field so it wasn’t that hard to get into it. 

In April of last year, I reached out to a couple of professors, got a response, and in June, I started to hold meetings with the professor and tried to get more involved in their field. I’ve been interested in astrophysics for as long as I can remember, and this seemed like a great way to get experience. 

The biggest hurdle I had to overcome was the knowledge gap, since participating in research requires a lot of prerequisite knowledge. I went through a lot of self studying for different astrophysics courses and went through multiple university pages. Using these resources, I built a sufficient baseline to continue the rest of my research.

We started with literature reviews, looking through past research papers, and then worked on devising a plan for the future of our research. Through the summer, we worked on the project idea, and finally landed on finding supermassive early galaxies.

Using telescopic data, we took pictures of really far stars and recorded light data. From the light data, we were then able to find out where the absorbers in the galaxy were. Our data analysis after that focused on the property of such absorbers, their mass, size, and other details. The end goal was to find out where dark matter lies in the galaxy, since those were the structures that eventually build up to be galaxies.

The next steps are expanding on my paper since it’s in preprint, possibly interning at research labs, and doing further research on the universe!