As a partner member of the UVEX collaboration, Geneva University is leading three key aspects of the project:
- the UVIM telescope door mechanism in collaboration with Swiss aerospatial industries.
- simulations to define the UVEX science case
- a centre of expertise in Europe to help scientists to exploit the UVEX mission
Uncovering ionising galaxies
Detecting and understanding the galaxies responsible for reionizing the Universe in the first billion years after the Big Bang is one of the great challenges of modern astrophysics. Thanks to its outstanding UV capabilities, UVEX will be able to measure the energetic radiation (λ < 912 A) emitted by low-mass galaxies at z ~ 2 which are supposedly analogs to the sources of reionization at z > 6.
In order to provide forecasts for the upcoming UVEX survey, we are using known detections (from the Low-z Lyman Continuum and ASTROSAT surveys) and state-of-the-art RAMSES-RT simulations to predict the expected flux levels and number counts of ionising galaxies to be found by UVEX.
