Disrupting and Dispersing Star Clusters

Most stars are thought to form within groups or clusters of some sort. However, these clusters do not survive for long, with some unknown process disrupting them and dispersing their stellar content throughout the galaxy. Recent studies have shown that this dispersal can be both highly explosive and dramatically asymmetric, yet the mechanisms responsible are still unknown. Our ability to study these dispersing stellar systems has been limited in the past by a lack of kinematic data, but this is changing now thanks to data from the Gaia satellite and complementary multi-object spectrographs. WEAVE is the first next-generation multi-object spectrograph, capable of observing 1000 targets at once, and currently being installed on the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands. Over the coming five years our WEAVE survey of young stars will generate one of the largest ever spectroscopic samples of young stars, allowing us to trace their distribution and study their 3D distribution and kinematics. This project will combine state-of-the-art Gaia data with spectroscopy from the new WEAVE multi-object spectrograph to study the kinematics of dispersing star clusters to understand the physical mechanisms responsible for their dramatic disruption. This PhD position is well-timed to get your hands on the first WEAVE data and join the team!