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
Shah H
(2025)
Understanding gas mixing in the circumgalactic medium
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Baker M
(2025)
Stellar-gas kinematic misalignments in eagle : lifetimes and longevity of misaligned galaxies
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Eales S
(2025)
A very short history of submillimetre astronomy
in Astronomy & Geophysics
Naess S
(2025)
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR6 maps
in Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics
Greaves John
(2025)
Call a star a Mira and it immediately gets the hump: Z UMa revisited
in British Astronomical Association Variable Star Section Circular
Monteiro H
(2025)
The planetary nebula NGC 3132 revisited: high definition 3D photoionization model
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Moraga Baez Paula
(2025)
Portrait of NGC 6537: A Rapidly Evolving, Bipolar Planetary Nebula as Seen with JWST and ALMA
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #245
Essinger-Hileman T
(2025)
Design and implementation of optics for the experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping (EXCLAIM).
in The Review of scientific instruments
Scicluna P.
(2025)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: NESS II Infrared and Sub-mm results (Scicluna+, 2022)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Jencson Jacob
(2025)
A JWST View of the Dynamic Interstellar Medium with Infrared Echoes of Cas A
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #245
Bešlic I
(2025)
The first estimation of the ionization fraction in dense and translucent molecular gas across Orion B
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Zhang H
(2025)
WISDOM Project - XXII. A 5 per cent precision CO-dynamical supermassive black hole mass measurement in the galaxy NGC 383
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Burgarella Denis
(2025)
The p-IR Survey: A 10 000 deg2 Far-IR Legacy Survey with PRIMAger
in PRIMA General Observer Science Book Volume 2
Wesson R
(2025)
JWST imaging observations of the Ring Nebula
in Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union
Ade P
(2025)
BICEP/ Keck XVIII: Measurement of BICEP3 polarization angles and consequences for constraining cosmic birefringence and inflation
in Physical Review D
Cherouvrier D.
(2025)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: N2CLS COSMOS field NIKA2 galaxy cluster cand. (Cherouvrier+, 2025)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Lestrade J.-F.
(2025)
VizieR Online Data Catalog: Herschel DEBRIS survey of M-dwarfs (Lestrade+, 2025)
in VizieR Online Data Catalog
Savini G
(2025)
A metamaterial telescope at millimetre wavelengths
Katsioli S
(2026)
Resolved ISM properties and scaling relations in the barred galaxy NGC 3627: constraints from NIKA2 observations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Lagache G
(2026)
Overdense fireworks in GOODS-N: Unveiling a record number of massive dusty star-forming galaxies at z ~ 5.2 with the N2CLS
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Bernard Lee
(2026)
Design, Assembly, Testing, and Flight Integration of the EXCITE Spectrograph
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
Wesson R
(2026)
3D insights into SN 1987A: ALMA observations compared to hydrodynamical explosion simulations
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Wesson R
(2026)
WEAVE imaging spectroscopy of NGC 6720: an iron bar in the Ring
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Georgatos T
(2026)
The influence of magnetic fields in Cloud-Cloud Collisions
Ruiz-Lara T
(2026)
Chronology of our Galaxy from Gaia colour-magnitude diagram fitting (ChronoGal) IV. The inner Milky Way stellar age distribution
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
DerKacy J
(2026)
JWST Observations of SN 2023ixf. I. Completing the Early Multiwavelength Picture with Plateau-phase Spectroscopy
in The Astrophysical Journal
Attwater A
(2026)
MAUVE-MUSE: A Star-formation-driven Outflow Caught in the Act of Quenching the Stripped Virgo Galaxy NGC 4064
in The Astrophysical Journal Letters
Armijos-Abendaño J
(2026)
Cloud properties and star formation in M31
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Girardi G
(2026)
Euclid : The first statistical census of dusty and massive objects in the ERO/Perseus field
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
Dabironezare S
(2026)
Lens Based Kinetic Inductance Detectors With Distributed Dual Polarized Absorbers for Far Infrared Space-Based Astronomy
in IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology
Liang F
(2026)
WISDOM Project - XXVII. Giant molecular clouds of the lenticular galaxy NGC 1387: similarities with spiral galaxy clouds
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Priestley F
(2026)
NEATH - V. The relationship between line emission from dense gas tracers and the star formation rate
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Plume R
(2026)
MAJORS II: HCO+ & HCN Abundances in W40
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Zhang Hengyue
(2026)
Tracing black hole-galaxy co-evolution across cosmic time: supermassive black hole mass measurements using gas dynamics from the local universe to unprecedented redshifts
in American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts
Otter J
(2026)
Clumpy, Dense Gas in the Outflow of NGC 1266
in The Astrophysical Journal
Prasad D
(2026)
XMAGNET: kinetic, thermal, and magnetic AGN feedback in massive galaxies at halo masses ~1013.5 M?
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Elford J
(2026)
Stellar-mass black holes on the millimetre Fundamental Plane of black hole accretion
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Bhatt C
(2026)
Detection of CO$_2$ ice in the planetary nebula NGC 6302
Liang Fu-Heng
(2026)
WISDOM Project - XXVII. Giant molecular clouds of the lenticular galaxy NGC 1387: similarities with spiral galaxy clouds
in arXiv e-prints
Bieri R
(2026)
Unveiling the Impact of Cosmic Rays on the Disc Sizes and Outflows from Dwarf Scales to Galaxy Groups
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Bakx T
(2026)
Probing infrared eXcess to investigate early-Universe dust (PIXIEDust)
in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Ponthieu N
(2026)
NIKA2 Cosmological Legacy Survey. First measurement of the confusion noise at the IRAM 30 m telescope
in Astronomy & Astrophysics
| Title | Spectral cubes of the IRAM 30m molecular line observations of HCN, HCO+, and N2H+ presented in the paper "Dense gas tracers in and between spiral arms: from Giant Molecular Filaments to star-forming clumps" by O. Feher,... |
| Description | The folder contains the .fits spectral cubes of the dense gas molecular tracer observations (HCN, HCO+, N2H+) that serve as an observational foundation of the paper "Dense gas tracers in and between spiral arms: from Giant Molecular Filaments to star-forming clumps" by O. Feher, S. E. Ragan, F. D Priestley, P. C. Clark, published by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf909The dense gas tracer spectroscopic observations were performed with the IRAM 30m telescope during 2017 and 2022. The details of the observations and basic calibration can be found in the article. The files shared here are the .fits spectral cubes that are:corrected for off-position contaminationbaseline-subtractedconverted from TA antenna temperature to TMB main beam brightness temperatureextracted to the narrow spectral bandwidth around the target spectral linesconverted to a uniform sampling of 5.55" pixelsThe astronomical objects are two Giant Molecular Filaments, one towards the Sagittarius spiral arm, and one towards an interarm region. The interarm filament consists of 4 regions (Regions 1-4), the spiral arm filament 2 regions (Regions 5-6). See the paper for the exact definition and sky coverage of these. This folder contains the HCN, HCO+, and N2H+ spectral cubes observed towards these regions, each file for each region and molecule. |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2025 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| URL | https://research-data.cardiff.ac.uk/articles/dataset/Spectral_cubes_of_the_IRAM_30m_molecular_line_o... |