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
Bonato Matteo
(2023)
Extragalactic science goals and predictions for the SPICE Far-IR Probe
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
Bing L. -J.
(2024)
Faint millimeter NIKA2 dusty star-forming galaxies: finding the high-redshift population
in arXiv e-prints
Rho J
(2023)
Far-infrared polarization of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A with SOFIA HAWC +
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Chastenet J.
(2023)
Far-IR polarized emission in the Crab Nebula with SOFIA/HAWC+
in SF2A-2023: Proceedings of the Annual meeting of the French Society of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Bakx T
(2024)
FLASH: Faint Lenses from Associated Selection with Herschel
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Wang J
(2022)
Formation of the SDC13 Hub-filament System: A Cloud-Cloud Collision Imprinted on the Multiscale Magnetic Field
in The Astrophysical Journal
Prole L
(2023)
From dark matter halos to pre-stellar cores: high resolution follow-up of cosmological Lyman-Werner simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Kirchschlager F
(2024)
From total destruction to complete survival: dust processing at different evolutionary stages in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Rigby A
(2022)
Galactic Star Formation with NIKA2 (GASTON): Evidence of mass accretion onto dense clumps
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Peretto N
(2022)
Galactic star formation with NIKA2 (GASTON): Filament convergence and its link to star formation
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Gaudel M
(2023)
Gas kinematics around filamentary structures in the Orion B cloud
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Prole Lewis R.
(2023)
Heavy Black Hole Seed Formation in High-z Atomic Cooling Halos
in arXiv e-prints
Urry C. Megan
(2023)
High Resolution Imaging and Spectroscopy of Obscured Galaxies and AGN with the SPICE Far-Infrared Probe
in AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division
Bolliet Boris
(2023)
High-accuracy emulators for observables in $\Lambda$CDM, $N_\mathrm{eff}$, $\Sigma m_\nu$, and $w$ cosmologies
in arXiv e-prints
Pantoni L.
(2023)
IAS/CEA Evolution of Dust in Nearby Galaxies (ICED): the spatially-resolved dust properties of NGC4254
in arXiv e-prints
Ansari Z
(2022)
Inferring properties of dust in supernovae with neural networks
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Cai Z
(2022)
Interpreting the Statistical Properties of High-z Extragalactic Sources Detected by the South Pole Telescope Survey
in The Astrophysical Journal
Whitworth A
(2022)
Ionizing feedback from an O star formed in a shock-compressed layer
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Bouchet P.
(2024)
JWST MIRI Imager Observations of Supernova SN 1987A
in arXiv e-prints
Arendt R
(2023)
JWST NIRCam Observations of SN 1987A: Spitzer Comparison and Spectral Decomposition
in The Astrophysical Journal
Larsson J
(2023)
JWST NIRSpec Observations of Supernova 1987A-From the Inner Ejecta to the Reverse Shock
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Wesson R
(2024)
JWST observations of the Ring Nebula (NGC 6720): I. Imaging of the rings, globules, and arcs
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Mallaby-Kay M
(2023)
Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with ACT, DES, and BOSS: A novel hybrid estimator
in Physical Review D
Ahmadi A
(2023)
Kinematics and stability of high-mass protostellar disk candidates at sub-arcsecond resolution Insights from the IRAM NOEMA large programme CORE
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
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
Bron E
(2022)
Learning from model grids: Tracers of the ionization fraction in the ISM
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Irani I
(2022)
Less Than 1% of Core-collapse Supernovae in the Local Universe Occur in Elliptical Galaxies
in The Astrophysical Journal
Santander-García M
(2022)
Lessons from the Ionised and Molecular Mass of Post-CE PNe
in Galaxies
Priestley F
(2023)
Line emission from filaments in molecular clouds
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Campeti P.
(2023)
LiteBIRD Science Goals and Forecasts. A Case Study of the Origin of Primordial Gravitational Waves using Large-Scale CMB Polarization
in arXiv e-prints
Lonappan A. I.
(2023)
LiteBIRD Science Goals and Forecasts: A full-sky measurement of gravitational lensing of the CMB
in arXiv e-prints
Namikawa T.
(2023)
LiteBIRD Science Goals and Forecasts: Improving Sensitivity to Inflationary Gravitational Waves with Multitracer Delensing
in arXiv e-prints
Ward B
(2024)
Little evolution of dust emissivity in bright infrared galaxies from 2 < z < 6
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Greaves J
(2022)
Low levels of sulphur dioxide contamination of Venusian phosphine spectra
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Artis E.
(2022)
Massive merging cluster PSZ2G091 as seen by the NIKA2 camera
in arXiv e-prints
Liu B
(2022)
Massive Molecular Gas Reservoir in a Luminous Submillimeter Galaxy during Cosmic Noon
in The Astrophysical Journal
Peretto N.
(2022)
Meeting contribution: The earliest stages of star cluster formation
in Journal of the British Astronomical Association
Eales Stephen
(2023)
Metal Factories in the Early Universe
in arXiv e-prints
Matsuura M
(2022)
Mid-infrared imaging of Supernova 1987A
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Atkins Zachary
(2023)
mnms: Map-based Noise ModelS
in Astrophysics Source Code Library
Faustino Vieira H
(2024)
Molecular clouds in M51 from high-resolution extinction mapping
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Vieira H
(2023)
Molecular clouds in M51 from high-resolution extinction mapping
Muñoz-Echeverría M
(2023)
Multi-probe analysis of the galaxy cluster CL J1226.9+3332 Hydrostatic mass and hydrostatic-to-lensing bias
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Muñoz-Echeverría M
(2022)
Multi-probe analysis of the galaxy cluster CL J1226.9+3332: Hydrostatic mass and hydrostatic-to-lensing bias
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Traficante A
(2022)
Multi-scale dynamics in star-forming regions: The interplay between gravity and turbulence
in EPJ Web of Conferences
Wiseman P.
(2023)
Multiwavelength observations of the extraordinary accretion event AT2021lwx
in arXiv e-prints
Guise E
(2022)
Multiwavelength optical and NIR variability analysis of the Blazar PKS 0027-426
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
García-Rojas J
(2022)
MUSE spectroscopy of planetary nebulae with high abundance discrepancies
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society