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I'm Jacob (or Jay), a student in the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York. This is a simple, blog-like site dedicated to my work studying math, physics, and astronomy. It contains research notes, teaching materials, and other helpful stuff I make. Essentially, it's an online CV-type-thing, but a little less professional and with some pictures of my dog. Yay!
Recently, I've been working on a project comparing poststarburst samples from the Tomotsugu Goto E+A catalog with more recent E+A data collected by the MApping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point (MaNGA) survey. So far, I have scraped data from Sloan's DR7 release, to get colors and magnitudes for 748 poststarburst galaxies. I've also recreated data analysis performed by Olivia Greene, in her awesome paper titled Refining the E+A galaxy I hope to eventually use this data to query for E+As using only broadband ugrizy magnitudes, which would give us a huge sample to analyze these galaxies. Below is a poster put together for the 2024 Vera C. Rubin Community Workshop, where I briefly outline my methods and discuss further plans in more detail.
When not studying for exams or tutoring, I can usually be found working on processing star formation rate data for poststarburst galaxies. I do this with the help of SDSS MaNGA, which catalogs these galaxies in enough detail to get interesting results. So far, I've written a python script to pull per-spaxel star formation data for these galaxies. You can find the link to that here. Currently, I'm stress testing the calculator, and trying to find a science use case for the data it generates.
I'm also interested in "E+A+" candidates, an unofficial name for galaxies which are "almost" poststarburst, but have emission spectra suggesting some remaining star formation. An interesting research note on the subject can be found here.
Here, I've included some preliminary per-spaxel SFR results for sample galaxies in the MaNGA survey. These images are meant to give you an idea of what the data looks like, and what kind of information it contains.
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I love education, and try to make time for it whenever I'm too frustrated to look at my Jupyter Notebooks. I usually tutor math and physics in person and online at the College of Staten Island, but I'm also interested in producing educational material for a more general audience. So far, I've just made a couple videos about introductory Matlab, but I have plans to produce more content in the future (when I get really frustrated with my Jupyter Notebooks).