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
Priestley F
(2023)
Differences in chemical evolution between isolated and embedded prestellar cores
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Ward B
(2024)
Little evolution of dust emissivity in bright infrared galaxies from 2 < z < 6
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Faustino Vieira H
(2024)
Molecular clouds in M51 from high-resolution extinction mapping
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Hervías-Caimapo C
(2024)
The atacama cosmology telescope: Flux upper limits from a targeted search for extragalactic transients
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Jones G
(2023)
On the density regime probed by HCN emission
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Rohde P
(2022)
Protostellar outflows: a window to the past
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Zsíros S
(2024)
Serendipitous detection of the dusty Type IIL SN 1980K with JWST /MIRI
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Liang F
(2024)
WISDOM project - XVIII. Molecular gas distributions and kinematics of three megamaser galaxies
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Rigby A
(2024)
The dynamic centres of infrared-dark clouds and the formation of cores
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
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
García-Rojas J
(2022)
MUSE spectroscopy of planetary nebulae with high abundance discrepancies
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Brennan S
(2022)
Photometric and spectroscopic evolution of the interacting transient AT 2016jbu(Gaia16cfr)
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Jin S
(2023)
The wide-field, multiplexed, spectroscopic facility WEAVE: Survey design, overview, and simulated implementation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Matsuura M
(2022)
Mid-infrared imaging of Supernova 1987A
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Hogarth L
(2024)
The ALMaQUEST Survey XIV: do radial molecular gas flows affect the star-forming ability of barred galaxies?
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
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
Shaikh S
(2024)
Cosmology from cross-correlation of ACT-DR4 CMB lensing and DES-Y3 cosmic shear
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Onori F
(2022)
The nuclear transient AT 2017gge: a tidal disruption event in a dusty and gas-rich environment and the awakening of a dormant SMBH
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Niculescu-Duvaz M
(2022)
Dust masses for a large sample of core-collapse supernovae from optical emission line asymmetries: dust formation on 30-year time-scales
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Glass D
(2022)
Cool interstellar medium as an evolutionary tracer in ALMA-observed local dusty early-type galaxies
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Matsuura M
(2022)
Spitzer and Herschel studies of dust in supernova remnants in the Small Magellanic Cloud
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Wesson R
(2023)
Evidence for late-time dust formation in the ejecta of supernova SN 1995N from emission-line asymmetries
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Crowther P
(2024)
Oxygen abundance of ? Vel from [O iii ] 88 µm Herschel /PACS spectroscopy
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Eales S
(2024)
The Rise and Fall of Dust in the Universe
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
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
Priestley F
(2022)
Properties of shocked dust grains in supernova remnants
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Loni A
(2023)
NGC 1436: the making of a lenticular galaxy in the Fornax Cluster
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
Klitsch A
(2023)
ALMACAL - X. Constraints on molecular gas in the low-redshift circumgalactic medium
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
De Marco O
(2023)
Author Correction: The messy death of a multiple star system and the resulting planetary nebula as observed by JWST
in Nature Astronomy
De Marco O
(2022)
The messy death of a multiple star system and the resulting planetary nebula as observed by JWST
in Nature Astronomy
Pan GA
(2022)
Superconductivity in a quintuple-layer square-planar nickelate.
in Nature materials
Mallaby-Kay M
(2023)
Kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect with ACT, DES, and BOSS: A novel hybrid estimator
in Physical Review D
Kreisch C
(2024)
Atacama Cosmology Telescope: The persistence of neutrino self-interaction in cosmological measurements
in Physical Review D
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
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
Serjeant S
(2024)
An Upper Limit to Differential Magnification Effects in Strongly Gravitationally Lensed Galaxies
in Research Notes of the AAS
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
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
Cai Z
(2022)
Interpreting the Statistical Properties of High-z Extragalactic Sources Detected by the South Pole Telescope Survey
in The Astrophysical Journal
Koch P
(2022)
A Multiscale Picture of the Magnetic Field and Gravity from a Large-scale Filamentary Envelope to Core-accreting Dust Lanes in the High-mass Star-forming Region W51
in The Astrophysical Journal
Dong ? Y
(2022)
SN 2016dsg: A Thermonuclear Explosion Involving a Thick Helium Shell
in The Astrophysical Journal
Omoruyi O
(2024)
"Beads-on-a-string" Star Formation Tied to One of the Most Powerful Active Galactic Nucleus Outbursts Observed in a Cool-core Galaxy Cluster
in The Astrophysical Journal
Irani I
(2022)
Less Than 1% of Core-collapse Supernovae in the Local Universe Occur in Elliptical Galaxies
in The Astrophysical Journal