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Galaxies at ‘cosmic noon’: Research gives deep dive into universe’s wild growth spurt
A new University of Kansas survey of distant galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen star formation and black hole growth at “cosmic noon,” a mysterious epoch 2-3 billion years after the Big Bang when galaxies like the Milky Way underwent an intense growth spurt.
Partisan politics proved most significant factor for speed of corporate shutdowns during pandemic, study shows
New research by three professors from the University of Kansas School of Business finds that the political environment was the most significant factor for how quickly corporations responded to the crisis. “Our paper underscores the role regulatory factors and politics play in times of crisis,” said Shradha Bindal, KU assistant professor of finance.
Hybrid research symposium planned for Undergraduate Research Week
The Center for Undergraduate Research at the University of Kansas is hosting online and in-person research presentations through April 25 to celebrate Undergraduate Research Week, featuring the work of more than 150 Jayhawks.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Brendan M. Lynch, 785-864-8855, [email protected]
Galaxies at ‘cosmic noon’: Research gives deep dive into universe’s wild growth spurt
LAWRENCE — A new University of Kansas survey of distant galaxies using the James Webb Space Telescope reveals never-before-seen star formation and black hole growth at “cosmic noon” — a mysterious epoch 2-3 billion years after the Big Bang when galaxies like the Milky Way underwent an intense growth spurt.
The results of the MIRI EGS Galaxy and AGN (MEGA) survey soon will be published by the Astrophysical Journal. But a preprint of the findings appears on arXiv (PDF) now.
According to KU researchers, galaxies were churning out new stars so intensely during cosmic noon, all galaxies today owe half their stellar mass to stars forged during this epoch. The KU team is seeking public participation in determining the shapes of galaxies and looking for galaxy mergers. Any member of the public can classify galaxies in the Cosmic Collisions Zooniverse project.
“Our goal with this project is to conduct the largest JWST survey in the mid-infrared across multiple bandwidths,” said principal investigator Allison Kirkpatrick, associate professor of physics & astronomy at KU, who led the survey work. “We are the premier mid-infrared survey to date. The mid-infrared is where dust emits, so we’re looking at dust-obscured galaxies. Dust hides a lot of things, and we want to peer behind the dust. We want to understand how these galaxies are forming stars, how many stars they’re forming and especially how the black holes at their centers are growing.”
Using the JWST’s much-enhanced power in the mid-infrared spectrum, the KU-led team gazed through this cosmic dust to observe galaxies sufficiently far away that arriving light had left their stars during cosmic noon, 10 billion years in the past. They sought to learn more about galaxies with active galactic nuclei (or, supermassive black holes that are rapidly growing in size) in a galaxy-rich deep field near the Ursa Major constellation, considered a “clean window” for extragalactic observation called the “Extended Groth Strip.”
“The Extended Groth Strip is a region of the sky that has now become one of the premier JWST fields,” Kirkpatrick said. “I was on the proposal that received the very first data from the James Webb Space Telescope. This survey is called CEERS — Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science. We got the first images from JWST, and they were of the Extended Groth Strip. Within this region, we’re able to see about 10,000 galaxies — even though the area is only roughly the diameter of the moon.”
Lead author Bren Backhaus, postdoctoral researcher in physics & astronomy at KU, pored through the impressive amount of new JWST data and worked with raw images to produce usable scientific images and information useful to the astronomy community.
“In theory, a galaxy could show up in one image and not another because we’re using different filters,” Backhaus said. “It’s like taking pictures using only red, blue or green light — which eventually create very pretty images. But because the telescope is moving slightly, the images are a little out of frame with each other. The first step is simply receiving the images. The next step involves correcting for known issues with the telescope. For example, there’s a known scratch that appears in every image, and there are dead pixels. The first task is to fix or at least tell the software to ignore those pixels.”
Next, Backhaus aligned the separate images, giving them a reference for how they should overlap. Her final step was to combine the images properly relative to one another.
“I was doing all of that to create our science-ready images,” Backhaus said. “Then, my next goal was to make a catalog — finding a measurable amount of light and recording how much light is coming in through a given filter to support our larger publication. That was my primary work with the data, and I was really excited because I had never worked with photometry data before. It really expanded my skill set, and I got to see beautiful galaxies before anyone else.”
Up to now, the KU-led collaboration has logged 67 hours commanding the JWST. The project recently was funded for another cycle, or about 30 more hours of telescope time. Data will be used at KU for research and training for a time before being made available publicly.
“This is the largest amount of JWST data we’ve been able to bring to KU with a principal investigator here, which means KU students have exclusive use of this data for now,” Kirkpatrick said. “It’s not public yet. The way telescope time works is that because so much effort goes into writing a proposal, you’re given a year of exclusive use of the data. Then it gets released into a public database, but only as raw data. Anyone can access it, but they’d have to do their own processing, which has taken months in our case.”
For the time being, only KU physics and astronomy researchers can access “this beautiful dataset,” Kirkpatrick said. Ongoing research includes finding the galaxies that could be the ancestors of Milky Way-like galaxies today — visible for the first time in the mid-IR thanks to MEGA, measuring how rapidly galaxies form stars and grow their black holes, and looking at how galaxies change their appearance due to mergers over time. All of these projects give researchers an unprecedented look at how galaxies like the Milky Way have “grown up.”
“All my students are working on it,” she said. “It’s a really unique thing for KU right now.”
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Why do university graduates wear caps and gowns? Journalism professor and academic regalia expert Steve Wolgast unpacks the history behind hoods, tassels, stoles and more on this latest KU News Service podcast episode. Listen and subscribe to “When Experts Attack!” wherever you get your podcasts.
https://whenexpertsattack.libsyn.com/regalia-is-for-scholars-not-just-kings
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Contact: Jon Niccum, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
Partisan politics proved most significant factor for speed of corporate shutdowns during pandemic, study shows
LAWRENCE — Whether corporate shutdowns should have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic remains a hotly debated topic. But what is not debatable is that some firms shut down earlier than others.
New research by three professors from the University of Kansas School of Business finds that the political environment was the most significant factor for how quickly corporations responded to the crisis.
“Our paper underscores the role regulatory factors and politics play in times of crisis,” said Shradha Bindal, KU assistant professor of finance.
Her paper titled “Corporate Shutdowns in the Time of COVID-19” investigates the speed with which U.S. firms shut down their headquarters because of the pandemic. Among its revelations is that the political orientation of the firms and their CEOs matters. For example, Democrat-leaning CEOs in blue states shut down significantly faster than their counterparts. The research appears in the Journal of Corporate Finance.
Co-written by KU’s Felix Meschke and Kissan Joseph, the paper describes how “during the pandemic, companies had to balance financial viability, employee health and compliance with government directives. This balancing act was complicated by limited information about the virus, conflicting views on mask effectiveness and a polarized political climate.”
Given these challenges, Bindal’s team decided to figure out what aspect of firms or their CEOs most influenced their response to an event affecting the entire global economy.
“We expected that firms with lots of cash would shut down faster,” she said. “These firms were better positioned to weather the crisis. We also expected CEOs to shut down faster if their pay was not tied closely to company stock. We wondered about overconfident CEOs: ‘Do they navigate the crisis more swiftly than others?’”
Since most firms did not announce their shutdown dates, the authors used mobile phone activity data at company headquarters to estimate when employees stopped coming to work. Using this novel methodological approach, the KU researchers found most of these characteristics had no impact. Neither firm incentives nor profits mattered. CEO characteristics such as overconfidence, age and gender didn’t either.
“We were surprised that the main takeaway was how political ideology shaped corporate responses,” she said.
For example, the research found Democratic-leaning firms in blue states shut down 4.39 days before state shelter-in-place orders. Republican-leaning firms in these same blue states delayed shutdowns, closing an average of 3.68 days before such orders. Political alignment between firms and CEOs was a critical driver: Democratic-leaning firms led by Democratic-leaning CEOs shut down an average of 1.5 days earlier. (This accounts for 28% of the sample’s average shutdown time of 5.38 days.)
“We don’t know whether shutting down faster was the right thing to do. Firms that shut down faster did not perform better or worse. We think it could be that Democrats prioritized collective welfare while Republicans emphasized individual liberty,” she said. “This would be consistent with the moral foundations theory made popular by NYU professor Jonathan Haidt.”
Bindal joined KU in 2019. Her research focuses on how institutional investors, product market competition and behavioral biases affect corporate decision making. She said that part of her interest in this research is due to her family background in business.
“My father runs a small hotel back in India. And when COVID came, he had to shut down the hotel — since the Indian government had imposed strict curfews — but he kept all his employees on payroll because he was worried about how they were going to feed their families,” she said.
All CEOs and business owners had to weigh the cost and benefit of such actions during the pandemic.
She said, “We can only speculate that when the environment is uncertain and it is difficult to predict outcomes, CEOs tend to rely on their broader belief system.”
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Research at KU powers 54 active startups with more than half based in Kansas.
https://ku.edu/distinction
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Contact: Center for Undergraduate Research, [email protected]
Hybrid research symposium planned for Undergraduate Research Week
LAWRENCE — The Center for Undergraduate Research at the University of Kansas is hosting online and in-person research presentations to celebrate Undergraduate Research Week. The 28th annual Undergraduate Research Symposium provides students a venue to share the results of their research and creative projects and the KU community the opportunity to learn from their discoveries.
This year’s event will feature in-person and online presentations, with virtual presentations available on the symposium website through April 25.
Eighteen students from a variety of disciplines will present oral presentations or artist talks April 24 in the Kansas Union on the fifth and sixth floors, while two poster presentation sessions featuring 75 students each will take place from 2-3 p.m. and 3:15-4:15 p.m. April 25 in Gray-Little Hall.
The event will end with three Accessible, Creative, and Engaging (ACE) Talk presentations from 4:30-5:30 p.m. April 25 in 1146 Gray-Little Hall.
“KU undergraduate students are engaged in amazing research that expands beyond the classroom. The in-person KU Undergraduate Research Symposium will provide an opportunity for the entire community to see the good work that students and mentors have completed this year,” said Kim Warren, vice provost for undergraduate education.
The Undergraduate Research Symposium began in 1998 with the vision of Professor Emeritus K. Barbara Schowen, who wanted to provide an opportunity for students to share the results of their research and creative projects and hone their communication skills. Over the past 25 years, the campus has seen an increase in the number of students, faculty and staff participating in and supporting this annual event.
ACE Talks
The ACE Talks are the keynote presentations for the online symposium. Students applied to give an ACE Talk by submitting an abstract of their work and a short video of themselves talking about their project. Selected ACE Talk presenters each receive $500 and have a video of their presentation posted on the homepage of the 2025 Symposium website. The 2025 ACE Talk winners:
Allison Monteleon, a student in social work from St. Mary’s, “Investigating Language Comprehension With a Coloring Book: A Study on Quantifier Meaning Comprehension Utilizing a Novel Method,” mentored by Utako Minai, associate professor of linguistics.
Larissa da Silva, a student in microbiology from Cali, Colombia, “Commensals and Host-Derived Compounds in Fecal Extract alters Vibrio cholerae Behavior,” mentored by Caetano Antunes, assistant professor of molecular biosciences, and Heidi Pauer, associate researcher of molecular biosciences.
Jimin Yoo, a student in psychology from Overland Park, “Guardian Adolescent Conversation Dynamics as a Mediator of Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in Adolescents,” mentored by Jeffrey Girard, assistant professor of psychology, and Dasha Yermol, graduate student in psychology.
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