Erik Garcia ‘20

Erik Garcia (F&M ‘20) worked on stacking broadband images of Lyman-alpha selected galaxies. These galaxies are often only detected individually in the narrow-band Lyman-alpha images that trace excited gas, but by taking broadband images at the locations where the galaxies are seen in Lyman-alpha and averaging these images together, Erik worked to determine the average luminosity of the galaxies at wavelengths of light that are sensitive to the starlight. Erik began this project by stacking galaxies in a single field and demonstrating that their average starlight could be detected even though individually they were too faint to detect. This work was instrumental to the next phases of the project developed by later students.

Erik majored in astrophysics with a computer science minor, and he was accepted to a graduate program in computer science at UCF in his home state of Florida. Way to go, Erik!