Michael Cooper
cooper "at" astro.berkeley.edu
Department of Astronomy
University of California at Berkeley



The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey
with Marc Davis, Jeff Newman, and the DEEP2 Team

Since the spring of 2002, I have been working as part of the DEEP2 team at UCB on the development of a DEIMOS data reduction pipeline and on the general design and implementation of the survey. Over the past 3+ years, the DEEP2 survey has utilized the new DEIMOS spectrograph on the Keck II telescope to target ~50,000 galaxies at redshifts 0.7 < z < 1.4 with the goal of studying the evolution of galaxy clustering and galaxy properties at z ~ 1. For more on the DEEP2 survey, visit the project website here.
In particular, I focus much of my time on the study of galaxy environments at a redshift of unity and their connections to galaxy properties, with an interest in exploring the role of local galaxy density on galaxy formation and evolution. Among the results uncovered with DEEP2 is that all major features of the correlation between mean overdensity and rest-frame color observed in the local universe were already in place at z ~ 1. This is nicely illustrated in the two plots below:

The left plot is from the SDSS at z ~ 0.1 (Blanton et al. 2005), while the right plot is from DEEP2 at z ~ 1 (Cooper et al. 2006). Both show the 1/Vmax-weighted mean galaxy overdensity as a function of rest-frame color. The general shapes of the two relations are extremely similar. Note, however, that the rest-frame passbands for the two survey samples are different and that the SDSS result is plotted in terms of linear overdensity while the DEEP2 result is given in log overdensity. A more detailed quantitative comparison is a focus of my current research.



The Team Keck Redshift Survey (TKRS)
with Greg Wirth and the rest of the TKRS team

The Team Keck Redshift Survey includes extensive an imaging and spectroscopic survey within the GOODS-North field. The survey was completed in the Spring of 2003 using the DEIMOS instrument on the Keck II telescope. The survey includes confirmed (by eye) spectroscopic redshifts for 1440 galaxies and 96 stars in the field, with a median redshift of z = 0.65. Details of the survey and data sample are provided in Wirth et al. 2004; the survey catalogs and spectra are also available for download from the TKRS website. My current interests in the GOODS-N field relate to studying the role of AGN (selected using X-ray source catalogs and optical emission-line diagnostics) in quenching star formation and relate to studying the morphology-density relation down to faint optical luminosities.



The All-Wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey (AEGIS)

AEGIS is a large collaboration between many survey teams and institutions with the goal of sharing data in order to carry out multi-wavelength studies of sources in the Extended Groth Strip (EGS). The teams involved in the project include: The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey team, the GALEX team, the Spitzer IRAC/MIPS teams, the POWIR team, and the CFHT Legacy Survey. The combined data set in the field includes 21cm and 6cm radio maps from the VLA, deep IRAC and MIPS imaging, optical BRI imaging from CFH (DEEP2), even deeper optical imaging as part of CFHTLS, extremely deep GALEX imaging, near-IR imaging using WIRC at Palomar, 1.6 mega-seconds of Chandra/ACIS imaging, HST/ACS V,I imaging, and more. Initial results from the AEGIS collaboration will be published as part of an upcoming ApJ Special Issue. For more info about AEGIS, visit the spiffy website here.



Dynamics of Nearby Galaxies
with Raja Guhathakurta, Marla Geha, Jason Kalirai, and others

Using high-resolution spectra of K giant stars in nearby galaxies, we map the kinematics of local dwarf spheroidals and ellipticals and M31. With large aperture telescopes (e.g., Keck), we are able to measure the radial velocities out to large radii, extending far out into the stellar halos. Many results from this work have already been published (e.g., Geha et al. 2006, Kalirai et al. 2006, Guhathakurta et al. 2006), with more to come in the near future.