The Co-evolution of Post-merger Galaxies and Dust-reddened Quasars

This project utilizes data obtained from the OSIRIS integral field spectrograph combined with Laser Guide-Star Adaptive Optics (LGS) to better understand the evolution of moderately dust-reddened quasars as well as their... [ view full abstract ]

This project utilizes data obtained from the OSIRIS integral field spectrograph combined with Laser Guide-Star Adaptive Optics (LGS) to better understand the evolution of moderately dust-reddened quasars as well as their hosting galaxies. The quasars considered are located in galaxies with high degree of merger activity, and thus we expect to see intense star-formation regions. The high spatial resolution of OSIRIS+LGS enables the analysis of the quasar contribution separately from that of star-formation regions. In turn, this provides more information about the host galaxy’s activity. The goal is to characterize the evolutionary stage of the host galaxy by extracting information about the degree of star formation and the kinematics for five different targets.