A Programme of Technology, Astrophysics and Cosmology in Cardiff, 2022-2025
Lead Research Organisation:
CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
Department Name: School of Physics and Astronomy
Abstract
Astronomers try to answer a wide range of questions, from fundamental ones, such as how stars and galaxies are formed and questions about the structure and evolution of the universe itself, to more detailed questions about the physical and chemical processes occurring in astronomical objects. A powerful way of trying to answer some of the most important ones is to make observations in the submillimetre waveband, one of the newest branches of astronomy. The births of stars and galaxies, for example, occur in huge clouds of gas and dust, and the dust - tiny solid fragments in interstellar space - hides the births from traditional optical telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope. With submillimetre telescopes, however, it is possible to observe radiation from the dust itself, allowing astronomers to observe the very earliest stages in the lives of stars and galaxies. Submillimetre astronomy is one of our specialities in Cardiff, with our group containing both astronomers that use submillimetre telescopes but also scientists that build novel cameras and other devices that work in this waveband - technology that also has many uses outside astronomy. In this proposal we ask for funds from the UK taxpayer to support our research. Much of this research involves using or building submillimetre instruments, but some of the projects we propose will use telescopes in other wavebands or use powerful computers to simulate the processes involved in the birth of a star or the formation of a galaxy. The questions we will try to answer include many of the most important ones. One of the surprising things about planets like ours is that they exist at all, because centimetre-sized solid chunks around a star are likely to be destroyed before they coalesce to form bigger chunks and eventually planets. We will use radio observations to search for chunks of this size in the disks of dust around newly formed stars, with the aim of understanding how small rocky planets like our own were formed, and in another project we will use a new balloon observatory to study the other end of the planetary spectrum - the giant 'hot Jupiters' that have been discovered around nearby stars. We propose several projects to investigate the formation of stars, both the stars that are forming around us today and a special population of stars with very few heavy elements that astronomers think formed just after the Big Bang, using a mixture of observations and computer simulations. We propose two project that will study supernovae, the titanic explosions that occur when a massive star collapses at the end of its life. One project will investigate the formation of dust grains and molecular gas within a supernova explosion, the other the recently discovered superluminous supernovae, up to 100 times more luminous than the standard kind. Again using a mixture of observations and computer simulations, we propose several projects to study galaxies, including a study of the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest big galaxy, an investigation of the super-massive black holes at the centres of nearby galaxies, a computer simulation of the gas flows around a galaxy, and a project to find more examples of very distant galaxies, which we are seeing only shortly after the Big Bang and that are being highly magnified by the gravity of close galaxies. More examples of these highly magnified galaxies is important because the magnification means that we can study the way galaxies are formed in great detail. We also propose two technical projects, one to develop kinetic inductance detectors, a kind of detector that our group largely discovered and which makes possible revolutionary new instruments, and one to develop further 'meta-materials', a kind of material that makes possible novel components for instruments, such as flat lenses, and which our group has used to make the filters for all submillimetre telescopes, on the ground and in space, over the last 30 years.
Organisations
Publications
Bissonette Daisy
(2023)
Star Formation Efficiency in Superthin Galaxies
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
Pursiainen M
(2023)
Polarimetry of Hydrogen-Poor Superluminous Supernovae
Brown T
(2023)
VERTICO. VII. Environmental Quenching Caused by the Suppression of Molecular Gas Content and Star Formation Efficiency in Virgo Cluster Galaxies
in The Astrophysical Journal
Bendo G
(2023)
The bright extragalactic ALMA redshift survey (BEARS) - II. Millimetre photometry of gravitational lens candidates
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Gensior J
(2023)
The WISDOM of power spectra: how the galactic gravitational potential impacts a galaxy's central gas reservoir in simulations and observations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Larsson J
(2023)
JWST NIRSpec Observations of Supernova 1987A-From the Inner Ejecta to the Reverse Shock
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Gaudel M
(2023)
Gas kinematics around filamentary structures in the Orion B cloud
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Beuther H.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: CORE Sample NIKA2 and SMA images (Beuther+, 2024)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Winkel N
(2023)
The Close AGN Reference Survey (CARS) A parsec-scale multi-phase outflow in the super-Eddington NLS1 Mrk 1044
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Jones O
(2023)
Ejecta, Rings, and Dust in SN 1987A with JWST MIRI/MRS
in The Astrophysical Journal
Watts A
(2023)
VERTICO V: The environmentally driven evolution of the inner cold gas discs of Virgo cluster galaxies
in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia
Cuenca J
(2023)
Superconducting boron doped nanocrystalline diamond microwave coplanar resonator
in Carbon
Muñoz-EcheverrĂa M
(2023)
Multi-probe analysis of the galaxy cluster CL J1226.9+3332 Hydrostatic mass and hydrostatic-to-lensing bias
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Priestley F
(2023)
NEATH - II. N2H+ as a tracer of imminent star formation in quiescent high-density gas
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Priestley F
(2023)
Differences in chemical evolution between isolated and embedded prestellar cores
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Vieira H
(2023)
Molecular clouds in M51 from high-resolution extinction mapping
Loni A
(2023)
NGC 1436: the making of a lenticular galaxy in the Fornax Cluster
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Chawner H.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: Dusty supernova remnants in the Galactic plane (Chawner+, 2020)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Li Y
(2023)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Systematic Transient Search of 3 Day Maps
in The Astrophysical Journal
Singha M
(2023)
The Close AGN Reference Survey (CARS): An Interplay between Radio Jets and AGN Radiation in the Radio-quiet AGN HE0040-1105
in The Astrophysical Journal
Hogarth L
(2023)
Kinematics of molecular gas in star-forming galaxies with large-scale ionized outflows
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Moran S
(2023)
A long life of excess: The interacting transient SN 2017hcc
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Dimitriadis G
(2023)
SN 2021zny: an early flux excess combined with late-time oxygen emission suggests a double white dwarf merger event
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Zabel N
(2023)
Erratum: "VERTICO II: How H i-identified Environmental Mechanisms Affect the Molecular Gas in Cluster Galaxies" (2022, ApJ, 933, 10)
in The Astrophysical Journal
Ismail D
(2023)
z -GAL: A NOEMA spectroscopic redshift survey of bright Herschel galaxies II. Dust properties
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Einig L
(2023)
Deep learning denoising by dimension reduction: Application to the ORION-B line cubes
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Leisawitz David
(2023)
The Space Interferometer for Cosmic Evolution (SPICE) Far-IR Probe
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
Roberts I
(2023)
VERTICO VI. Cold-gas asymmetries in Virgo cluster galaxies
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Priestley F
(2023)
Do simulated molecular clouds look like real ones?
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Bakx T. J. L. C.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: A search for the lenses in the HerBS sample (Bakx+, 2020)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Arendt R
(2023)
JWST NIRCam Observations of SN 1987A: Spitzer Comparison and Spectral Decomposition
in The Astrophysical Journal
Duarte-Cabral A.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: The SEDIGISM survey: molecular clouds (Duarte-Cabral+, 2021)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Ruffa I
(2023)
WISDOM project - XIV. SMBH mass in the early-type galaxies NGC 0612, NGC 1574, and NGC 4261 from CO dynamical modelling
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Li Z.
(2023)
The Simons Observatory: a new open-source power spectrum pipeline applied to the Planck legacy data
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Nguyen-Luong Quang
(2023)
Learning Based on Shared Experience: A Proof of Concept at the SAGI summer school in Observational Astronomy
in Stars and Galaxies