PATT travel grant for University of Southampton

This grant will support trips to telescopes for observing by members of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton. The research in the School focuses primarily on understanding systems containing accreting compact objects (i.e. black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs). These systems can either be supermassive black holes, which can suck in gas from their surroundings, or binary star systems, in which the compact object can either peel material off its companion, or attract its companion's stellar wind. These objects tend to emit radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio through gamma-rays. Our group's observational efforts cover this spectrum, and the telescope trips for which we are proposing are focused on observations in the radio, infrared and optical bands. Additional work in the School consists of deep survey observations of regions of the sky without any bright objects, in order to find the faintest possible objects. This, again, is done across all wave bands. In this case, the main goal of the work is to determine what emission comes from the material that is being sucked into supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and what comes from stars in the galaxies themselves.