Sheffield Astronomy Research
The astronomy group within the Department of Physics & Astronomy comprises 5 academic staff, 2 post-docs and 9 research students, whose research interests are supported by STFC and Leverhulme grants and range from studies of planets, stars and star clusters within the Milky Way, to extragalactic starbursts and active galaxies. Recent group papers can be found via arXiv.org.
A list of PhD projects for prospective postgraduate students for Autumn 2012 entry is available here.
Research at Sheffield concentrates on three main areas:
1. ACTIVE GALAXIES, QUASARS AND STARBURSTS
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and their more luminous counterparts, quasars, are among the most powerful objects in the Universe, and there is increasing speculation that these extreme objects may be intimately linked to the evolution of galaxies in general. Our interests focus on using radio galaxies and radio-loud quasars to investigate the nature of the links between galaxy evolution and nuclear activity. It is thought that AGN and quasars are triggered by galaxy interactions and mergers, which may also trigger starbursts, ranging from nearby star-forming regions to galaxy-wide episodes at high redshift. Therefore another strand of our research involves investigating how stars form in major galaxy mergers, and understanding the relationship between starbursts and nuclear activity.
2. STARS AND STAR CLUSTERS
Stars are the fundamental component of the visible Universe, the furnaces in which most elements are born and the hosts of planetary systems. Almost all stars are born in star clusters, spanning a large range of masses and densities. We are interested in the how stars, brown dwarfs and planets form, in particular in binary and multiple stellar systems. We are especially interested in how stars form in star clusters, and how those star clusters evolve. Massive star clusters are of particular interest, as they contain many hot luminous stars which feed back energy and metals into the interstellar medium.
3. HIGH-SPEED ASTROPHYSICS & ASTRO-TOMOGRAPHY
The ancient Greeks believed the Universe to be perfect and unchanging, whereas we now know that astronomical objects vary in brightness on timescales ranging from milliseconds to billions of years. Although astronomy has made great strides in recent years, the study of the most rapidly varying phenonema (on timescales of milliseconds to seconds) has been largely ignored. To address this situation, we built ULTRACAM, a high-speed camera designed to study astronomical objects which eclipse, transit, occult, flicker, flare, pulsate, oscillate, erupt, outburst or explode, thereby opening up a new region of observational parameter space for discovery.
