Student Highlight - Christina Magagnoli

Christina Magagnoli of RIT recently completed a NYSG-funded research project.

Christina Magagnoli of RIT was awarded an NYSG-funded Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and spent the summer of 2018 analyzing the morphological properties of nearly 50,000 galaxies with Hubble Space Telescope images in the CANDELS fields. She compiled a catalog of sources across a wide red shift range (z=0-3) that show some evidence of merger activity, including double nuclei, tidal tails, and other disturbed morphologies. She then correlated this information with catalogs of galaxies identified as AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) through their X-ray detection or through their slopes in the infrared. She found the largest fraction of merging systems among those AGN that are selected through the infrared but that are not detected in the X-ray, implying they are deeply dust embedded systems, as expected during the merger process. Christina is pursuing an accelerated dual S/MS degree in Physics and Astrophysical Sciences and Technology. Her advisor is Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe.