High School Seniors’ Use of MaNGA to Investigate Dark Matter

We report the successful use of MaNGA IFU data in a high school senior project investigating dark matter in spiral galaxies. The project obtained rotation curves for 20 galaxies (in two redshift bins) and compared the curves to the galaxies’ luminosity distribution, yielding the percentage of dark matter in each galaxy. The lead student investigator (Caleb Vogt) also compared the results from the two bins to determine if statistically significant differences were detected.