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
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
Ismail D.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: z-GAL dust continuum properties (Ismail+, 2023)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Roberts I
(2023)
VERTICO VI: Cold-gas asymmetries in Virgo cluster galaxies
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
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
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
Berta S
(2023)
z -GAL: A NOEMA spectroscopic redshift survey of bright Herschel galaxies III. Physical properties
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Orlowski-Scherer J
(2023)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Millimeter Observations of a Population of Asteroids or: ACTeroids
Klitsch A
(2023)
ALMACAL - X. Constraints on molecular gas in the low-redshift circumgalactic medium
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters
Atkins Zachary
(2023)
mnms: Map-based Noise ModelS
in Astrophysics Source Code Library
Kramer C
(2023)
NIKA2 observations of starless cores in Taurus and Perseus
Bing L
(2023)
NIKA2 Cosmological Legacy Survey Survey description and galaxy number counts
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
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
Jiménez-Donaire M
(2023)
VERTICO III. The Kennicutt-Schmidt relation in Virgo cluster galaxies
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Fuskeland U
(2023)
Tensor-to-scalar ratio forecasts for extended LiteBIRD frequency configurations
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Nightingale J
(2023)
PyAutoGalaxy: Open-Source Multiwavelength Galaxy Structure & Morphology
in Journal of Open Source Software
Rho J
(2023)
Far-infrared polarization of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A with SOFIA HAWC +
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Lamperti I.
(2023)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: JINGLE V Dust properties of nearby galaxies (Lamperti+, 2019)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Moyer-Anin A
(2023)
Systematic effects on the upcoming NIKA2 LPSZ scaling relation
Gómez-Llanos V
(2023)
The planetary nebula NGC 6153 through the eyes of MUSE
Ward B
(2024)
Little evolution of dust emissivity in bright infrared galaxies from 2 < z < 6
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Priestley F
(2024)
NEATH III: a molecular line survey of a simulated star-forming cloud
Jin S
(2024)
The wide-field, multiplexed, spectroscopic facility WEAVE: Survey design, overview, and simulated implementation
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Dominiak P
(2024)
The MASSIVE survey - XIX. Molecular gas measurements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Bing L
(2024)
Faint mm NIKA2 dusty star-forming galaxies: Finding the high-redshift population
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Ward B. A.
(2024)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: H-ATLAS DR3 NIR counterparts in SGP field (Ward+, 2022)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Adam R
(2024)
NIKA2 observations of 3 low-mass galaxy clusters at z ~ 1: Pressure profile and Y SZ - M relation
in EPJ Web of Conferences
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
Kraemer Kathleen E.
(2024)
The Fornax Planetary Nebula - an LRS Pilot Study
in JWST Proposal. Cycle 3
Cox P
(2024)
z-GAL: A NOEMA spectroscopic redshift survey of bright Herschel galaxies I. Overview (Corrigendum)
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Bing L. -J.
(2024)
Faint millimeter NIKA2 dusty star-forming galaxies: finding the high-redshift population
in arXiv e-prints
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
Rosu S
(2024)
Hubble Space Telescope Images of SN 1987A: Evolution of the Ejecta and the Equatorial Ring from 2009 to 2022
in The Astrophysical Journal
Madhavacheril M
(2024)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 Gravitational Lensing Map and Cosmological Parameters
in The Astrophysical Journal
Marques G
(2024)
Cosmological constraints from the tomography of DES-Y3 galaxies with CMB lensing from ACT DR4
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
ZsÃros S
(2024)
Serendipitous detection of the dusty Type IIL SN 1980K with JWST /MIRI
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Larsson Josefin
(2024)
Expanding shocks and the emergence of the compact object in Supernova 1987A
in HST Proposal
Rho Jeonghee
(2024)
JWST observations of the Cassiopeia A Supernova Remnant : Heavy Elements and CO Formation and Associated Astrochemistry
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
De Looze I
(2024)
The Green Monster Hiding in Front of Cas A: JWST Reveals a Dense and Dusty Circumstellar Structure Pockmarked by Ejecta Interactions
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
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
Matsuura M
(2024)
Deep JWST /NIRCam imaging of Supernova 1987A
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society