Thompson, Rodger I., Eisenstein, Daniel, Fan, Xiaohui, Rieke, Marcia and Kennicutt, Robert C. 2007, Constraints on the Cosmic Near-Infrared Background Excess from NICMOS Deep Field Observations, Ap.J., 657, 669 (Extragalactic) Thompson, Rodger I., Eisenstein, Daniel, Fan, Xiaohui, Rieke, Marcia and Kennicutt, Robert C. 2007, Evidence for a Z < 8 Origin of the Source-Subtracted Near Infrared Background,,” Ap.J., 666, 658 (Extragalactic) “ Thompson, Rodger I., 2007, A Molecular Probe of Dark Energy, in Proceedings of ESO Astrophysics Symposia: Precision Spectroscopy in Astrophysics, ed. N.C. Santos, L. Pasquini, A.C.M. Correia and M. Romaniello, Springer, p. 113 (Extragalactic, Theoretical, Other) “”
R. Thompson, in collaboration with D. Eisenstein, X. Fan, M. Rieke and R. Kennicutt investigated the nature of the near infrared cosmic background and the claims that the majority of the near infrared background is due to objects at the epoch of reionization. They found that the cosmic near infrared background comes primarily from normal galaxies near a redshift of 1. They also investigated the fluctuation spectrum of the background after subtraction of all known sources. They found that the color of the fluctuations is incompatible with very high redshift sources and that the most likely source of the source subtracted background fluctuations is due to the faint outer edges of normal galaxies that falls below the detection limit of the observations. (Extragalactic) R. Thompson, in collaboration with M. Sauvage, R. Kennicutt, C. Engelbrach and L. Vanzi have used new high spatial resolution NICMOS images of the blue compact dwarf galaxy, SBS)335-052 to study the properties of the Super Star Clusters that lie at the nucleus of this remarkable galaxy. They have found previously unknown areas of star formation and have found that the two southern most cluster contain between 7 and 8 thousand O stars, all within radii on the order of 15 pc. They have also pinpointed the location of the observed molecular hydrogen emission to be inside the clusters containing the O stars. They use the atomic and molecular hydrogen emission to deduce that stellar winds absorb the bulk of the ionizing radiation, delaying the destructive feedback of photoionization by several million years. (Extragalactic) R. Thompson, in collaboration with J. Bechtold, X. Fan, D. Eisenstein, C. Martins, R. Kennicutt, and J. Black are investigating the value of the fundamental constant, the ratio of the proton to electron mass, in the early universe. They are using the absorption lines of molecular hydrogen producued by damped Lyman alpha systems in the spectra of distant quasars to determine the value of the constant which affects the wavelengths of the absorption lines. At present they are using existing spectra but have submitted a NSF proposal to do higher spectral resolution studies with PEPSI on the LBT. (Extragalactic, Theoretical, Other)