Science with the Thirty Meter Telescope


IRIS first-light integral-field spectrograph

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a next generation extremely large optical and infrared telescope. This telescope is being built by an international collaboration. TMT will observe objects as close as our own solar system all the way to the formation of the first stars in the universe. I am part of the science team and helping to build a data simulator for the first-light adaptive optics instrument InfraRed Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). We are using this simulator to realistically model observations using IRIS and TMT to evaluate and enhance science cases for TMT.


Measuring the mass of supermassive black holes

While supermassive black holes are found in the centers of almost all galaxies, there are many questions that we still don't understand. Some of the biggest questions are: how are supermassive black holes related to galaxy evolution? What are the origins of supermassive black holes and how do they grow over time? Using the IRIS simulator, we computed for the first time, realistic simulations of TMT's capabilities for measuring supermassive black hole masses in the universe. We find that there will be a revolutionary leap in our ability to detect black holes at every mass scale. This increase in the number of black holes accessible will help us answer long standing questions about black holes.


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