Ansh Gupta wins NSF GRFP Fellowship

Congratulations to Ansh Gupta, a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of Arizona majoring in physics and astronomy, who won the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program this year.  Ansh’s research focuses on searching for some of the most extreme objects in the Universe, called quasars.  With Dr. Xiaohui Fan and Dr. Jinyi Yang, he has worked to uncover information about the formation and evolution of quasars and their relationship with their host galaxies.

 

Ansh used data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to confirm quasar objects. The DESI survey is looking at millions of objects, splitting their light up into their component colors, or "spectra". By combing through thousands of "spectra", he determined which of the candidates were truly quasars and measured their distances away from us. The candidates he confirmed expanded the known sample of quasars within the first 1.25 billion years of the universe’s lifetime by nearly 50%. 

 

In his GRFP proposal, Ansh plans to apply state-of-the-art machine learning tools to mine new datasets from Euclid Space Telescope, Rubin Observatory, and Roman Space Telescope, and find unprecedented numbers of new quasars. The objects that such a method can uncover will help answer key questions surrounding these cosmic horrors.  
 

In the fall of 2024, Ansh will be joining the astronomy graduate program at The University of Texas at Austin.  He hopes to answer key mysteries of the early universe using cutting-edge observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope. As a graduate student, he will continue sharing these breathtaking discoveries through a variety of outreach efforts.