STAGE Searching for hidden black holes and merging-driven bursts inside normal-looking galaxies at high redshift

The successful candidate will use resolved galaxy images of distant galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) at different wavelengths from the UV to the near-IR observed frame to obtain pixel-by-pixel maps of their spectral energy distributions, inferring from this in turn pixel-by-pixel distributions of physical quantities like stellar age, mass, dust reddening and star formation rates. The maps will be used to explore new ideas to identify hidden structures inside the distant galaxies (often in their nuclei), like optically thick growing supermassive black holes and merging-driven starburst cores. This project is meant to be preparatory work for a subsequent PhD thesis with the same scientific aim but based on the exploitation of data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that will launch in Spring 2019 and will provide overwhelming improvements in sensitivity, resolution and wavelength coverage, thus with potentially highly exciting outcomes on these science problematics.