Preparing for 4MOST Surveys

This project will ensure that we are well-prepared to fully exploit data from upcoming galaxy surveys, in particular the 4-metre Multi-Object Spectrograph (4MOST) Cosmology and WAVES surveys, but also imaging data from Euclid and LSST. These surveys will revolutionise our understanding of galaxy evolution and cosmology. Studying the small-scale clustering and dynamics of galaxies, typically in group environments, will be used to constrain the nature of dark matter.
As an initial project, Todd will investigate ways of identifying galaxy groups from both spectroscopic and photometric survey data, including the use of probabilistic group finding, i.e. assigning probabilities of galaxies belonging to a particular group, rather than having a hard membership cut. Methods will be developed and tested using numerical simulations and existing data from the GAMA and SDSS surveys.