Valery P. Rashkov's Webpage

Research

Graduate

MW dwarf satellite masses in Via Lactea

I am currently working with Prof. P. Madau on my first year research project at UCSC. We are using the Via Lactea N-body simulation to study mass estimates of Milky Way dwarf satellite galaxies from stellar line-of-sight velocity dispersions. Stay tuned!

Undergraduate

Blazars as CMB foregrounds

I have been working on this project with Prof. D. Spergel and Prof. M. Strauss since the summer of 2007. We selected a list of Optically Violent Variable Souces from multi-epoch data in SDSS and a list of blazars based on a spectroscopic study. We have subsequently used stacking to look for a signal produced by these sources in Wiener-filtered CMB maps from WMAP.

Photometric Redshifts

I did this project with Prof. O. Lahav and Dr. F. Abdalla in the spring of 2007. We computed the photometric redshifts of a sample of SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies using two different codes (a template-fitting and a neural network code). For a sub-sample with known spectroscopic redshifts, we compared the performance of the two codes. This project was finished by Prof. Lahav, Dr. Abdalla and M. Banerji.

Faint Galaxies

I did this project with Prof. M. Strauss in the fall of 2006. We looked at spectra from the SDSS sky fibers (used for sky subtraction), and identified faint galaxies based on a number of emission lines consistent with a redshift estimated by the SDSS pipeline.