Phil Korngut, PhD.
Astrophysics and Observational Cosmology
Scientific Researcher, Caltech

About Me

I'm currently a Scientific Researcher at the California Institute of Technology, working in the Observational Cosmology Laboratory under Professor Jamie Bock. My interests are primarily focused on understanding the Extragalactic Background Light in the Near-Infrared with efforts split between the hardware implementation of experiments and the data analysis/astrophysical interpretation of results. I've worked on ground based cameras, sounding rocket missions and most recently, as the Instrument Scientist on the development of a NASA small explorer mission.

Miscellaneous fun excerpts from my work

Spherex Simulations

Here is a simulation I did of spectral observations of W33A as seen by Spherex. Each frame of the movie has a different bandpass which varies across the FOV. The white line shows the input spectrum and green the retrieved spectrum. The absorption lines arise from C0, XCN,and CO2 in a molecular cloud along the line of site to W33A.




CIBER Spectral Calibration


Here are some measurements made of the Bandpass of the NBS aboard CIBER. To the left shows the whole array's response to a uniformly illuminated sphere of monochromatic light with the wavelenth varied in time. To the right is the effective bandpass of a single pixel produced from this dataset, accurate to 1 part in a million.
The SZ Effect






Above is an image of the massive merging galaxy cluster MACSJ0717 I produced from HST-ACS 850nm (green), weak lensing mass reconstruction (contours) and Bolocam on the CSO at 1mm(blue) and 2mm(red). The asymmetry between blue and red is produced by the massive relative velocity of the infalling subcluster, which produces a kinetic Sunyaev Zel'Dovich effect from the motion of the hot plasma relative to the cosmic microwave background. This analysis is the first detection of the kSZ in a single system, and is published in Sayers et al 2013.