A consolidated grant for Sheffield Astrophysics 2018-2021

Lead Research Organisation: University of Sheffield
Department Name: Physics and Astronomy

Abstract

The aim of this proposal is to support a programme of internationally excellent research in astrophysics at Sheffield, building on our recent research achievements, and tied to the exploitation of leading international facilities supported by STFC and UKSA.

Planned Impact

The main ways in which our research makes an impact outside the academic community is via our knowledge exchange and outreach activities. To summarise:

1. Knowledge exchange. This is primarily based on the building of the ULTRACAM and HiPERCAM instruments, which has lead to the development of new new CCD detector, data acquisition and cooling systems, as well as stimulating a project to develop new techniques to use 3D printing build rigid, lightweight support structure for astronomical instruments.

2. Outreach. Over the last 5 years members of the Sheffield astrophsyics group have delivered 126 talks to schools and astronomical societies, have held 70 in-house workshops for school students, and been involved in 15 press releases, all based on their research activities.

Details are given in our Impact Plan that is included as an attachment.

Publications

10 25 50

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Schaffenroth V (2021) A quantitative in-depth analysis of the prototype sdB+BD system SDSS J08205+0008 revisited in the Gaia era in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Parsons S (2021) Magnetic white dwarfs in post-common-envelope binaries in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Burhanudin U (2021) Light-curve classification with recurrent neural networks for GOTO: dealing with imbalanced data in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Schootemeijer A (2021) A dearth of young and bright massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud in Astronomy & Astrophysics

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Bulla M (2021) Polarized kilonovae from black hole-neutron star mergers in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Mullaney J (2021) Processing GOTO data with the Rubin Observatory LSST Science Pipelines I: Production of coadded frames in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia

 
Description The findings have been used to inform a variety of outreach activities, including talks to schools and amateur astronomy societies socities, as well as public lectures.
First Year Of Impact 2018
Sector Other
Impact Types Cultural,Societal