Astronomy at The Open University 2023-2026 (Consolidated Grant)

This proposal will fund astronomy researchers at The Open University. We will study the very most distant known objects, using a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This is a feature of general relativity which is very useful for our purposes: the warping of space-time by large masses at intermediate distances can magnify the images of objects right at the edge of the observable Universe, making them more visible.

We are using a powerful collection of 66 radio telescopes in Chile - called ALMA - to study water in galaxies at redshifts between 2 and 5. By doing this we will learn about the formation of stars throughout the history of the Universe. This will give us new understanding of how the very biggest galaxies which we see in the present-day Universe formed.

We are using another array of radio telescopes based in Europe called LOFAR to learn about jets of energetic particles which are accelerated out from the centre of galaxies. These jets are very long - longer than the size of a whole galaxy - and narrow structures which emit radio waves. LOFAR is extremely sensitive and is detecting jets which previous telescopes couldn't see. This is changing some of our understanding of what causes jets to have particular shapes and brightness patterns.

Using a new European space telescope called Euclid we are going to study giant clumps of stars forming in distance galaxies. There will be huge numbers of images to look at, so we are going to use citizen science to generate a large number of identifications of what we are looking for. Then we will train artificial intelligence to find all the similar examples.

We will find examples of small rocky planets - roughly Earth-sized - orbiting stars in the Sun's local part of our Galaxy. The ones we are looking for are hot, in some cases so hot that their rocky surfaces are molten or turned into gas which escapes. These particular planets are useful because we can use the starlight filtered through the escaping gas to measure the chemical composition of their rocky surfaces.

We will study ices - normal frozen water as well as ices made from carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and methanol - in the laboratory and with the James Webb Space Telescope. This will reveal the role ice plays in sticking grains together in the early stages of planet formation. Without this grains would bounce apart instead of growing to produce pebbles, and planets like the Earth would not be able to form.