Studying Transient X-ray Events as a Probe for Physics in Extreme Conditions

This project will make use of a combination of simulated data and real space telescope observations to probe the population of extreme-environment transient events in the universe. The student will develop models of different transient phenomena and use these to inject simulated events into real data from the Swift satellite. They will then use these to quantitatively explore the efficacy of the transient-detection pipelines created at the University of Leicester. They will then use these results to identify real transients in the archive of Swift data, classify them, and probe the extreme-environment physics they reveal. The primary source of data will be from the Swift satellite, which are public; the thesis and and journal papers will be published open access and made available through the University of Leicester Research Archive.