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
Ruffa I
(2022)
The AGN fuelling/feedback cycle in nearby radio galaxies - IV. Molecular gas conditions and jet-ISM interaction in NGC 3100
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Davis T
(2022)
WISDOM Project - X. The morphology of the molecular ISM in galaxy centres and its dependence on galaxy structure
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Pan G
(2022)
Synthesis and electronic properties of Nd n + 1 Ni n O 3 n + 1 Ruddlesden-Popper nickelate thin films
in Physical Review Materials
Liu B
(2022)
Massive Molecular Gas Reservoir in a Luminous Submillimeter Galaxy during Cosmic Noon
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
Shimajiri Y.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: Orion B molecular cloud CO and HCO datacubes (Shimajiri+, 2023)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Priestley F
(2023)
Do simulated molecular clouds look like real ones?
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Atkins Z
(2023)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: map-based noise simulations for DR6
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Arendt R
(2023)
JWST NIRCam Observations of SN 1987A: Spitzer Comparison and Spectral Decomposition
in The Astrophysical Journal
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
Pursiainen M
(2023)
Polarimetry of Hydrogen-Poor Superluminous Supernovae
Choi W
(2023)
WISDOM Project - XV. Giant molecular clouds in the central region of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 5806
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Rho J
(2023)
Far-infrared polarization of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A with SOFIA HAWC +
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Shimajiri Y
(2023)
Witnessing the fragmentation of a filament into prestellar cores in Orion B/NGC 2024
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
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
Einig L
(2023)
Deep learning denoising by dimension reduction: Application to the ORION-B line cubes
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Priestley F
(2023)
Differences in chemical evolution between isolated and embedded prestellar cores
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Larsson Josefin
(2023)
The nature of the compact object in SN 1987A
in JWST Proposal. Cycle 2
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
Ismail D
(2023)
z -GAL: A NOEMA spectroscopic redshift survey of bright Herschel galaxies II. Dust properties
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Lamperti I.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: JINGLE V Dust properties of nearby galaxies (Lamperti+, 2019)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Avison A
(2023)
Tracing Evolution in Massive Protostellar Objects - I. Fragmentation and emission properties of massive star-forming clumps in a luminosity-limited ALMA sample
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
Roberts I
(2023)
VERTICO VI. Cold-gas asymmetries in Virgo cluster galaxies
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
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
Bing L
(2023)
NIKA2 Cosmological Legacy Survey Survey description and galaxy number counts
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Moyer-Anin A
(2023)
Systematic effects on the upcoming NIKA2 LPSZ scaling relation
Orlowski-Scherer J
(2023)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Millimeter Observations of a Population of Asteroids or: ACTeroids
Duarte-Cabral A.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: The SEDIGISM survey: molecular clouds (Duarte-Cabral+, 2021)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Li Y
(2023)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Systematic Transient Search of 3 Day Maps
in The Astrophysical Journal
Mallaby-Kay M
(2023)
Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with ACT, DES, and BOSS: A novel hybrid estimator
in Physical Review D