Mr Soheil Koushan

I am in the third year of my Astronomy PhD at the UWA node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), having previously completed a Bachelors of Applied Physics and Masters of Atomic and Molecular Physics in 2009 at the Shahid Beheshti University in Iran. My Master thesis title was “A Study of the Scattering of Light with Conductive Spherical Nanoparticle “.

I’m supervised by Prof. Simon Driver and working on the EBL modelling and measuring from the “Wide Area VISTA Extra-galactic Survey” (WAVES) input catalogue. I will focus on constructing the Wide Area Vista Extragalactic Survey input catalogue in preparation for the “WAVES-Wide” and “WAVES-Deep” Surveys (Driver et al. 2015). WAVES is ∼ 2 million galaxies redshift survey is to be conducted on ESOs 4 meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope“4MOST” to commence in 2022.

Additionally, this work will use the WAVES input catalogue to calculate galaxy number counts in 9 bandpasses (0.4 micron – 2.1 micron) and model the extragalactic background light (EBL) contribution from resolved extragalactic sources. Mainly the EBL is energy from any source over the full path length of the universe. It is worth noting that it is intermediate magnitude galaxy number-counts such as these which dominate the overall EBL. This measurement does not contain any diffuse components.