Physics and Astronomy

Astronomy research placements

At Sussex, you learn from experts working at the forefront of physics. This means you study modules based on the latest research, whilst exploring the fundamental laws of physics. In the research placement programme, you will have the opportunity to directly experience world-leading physics research through paid placements in active research groups during the summer holidays. This unique experience will give you a significant advantage when you apply for jobs, either in academia or in industry.

High Energy Astrophysics

Faculty advisor: Kathy Romer

Working with the best X-ray catalogue ever produced, you will have the chance to examine first hand a wide variety of unusual astrophysical processes; active galactic nuclei, neutron stars, black holes, cool stars and clusters of galaxies. You will be part of an international team working at the forefront of cosmology.

Surveying the Universe

Faculty advisor: Jon Loveday

The Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) is compiling a database of imaging data taken across the electromagnetic spectrum from the UV (GALEX), through optical (SDSS, VST KIDS), near-IR (UKIDSS, VISTA VIKING) and far-IR (Herschel ATLAS) to radio (ASKAP DINGO).  Spectra are being obtained for about 375,000 galaxies to an r-band magnitude limit of 19.8, corresponding to a redshift limit z ~ 0.5.  GAMA will thus provide a unique database for studying all galaxy components (stars, gas and dust) in a representative volume in unprecedented detail.  Working with Jon Loveday, you will have access to the latest GAMA data before it is made public.

Possible projects on which you could work include:

  • Correlate intrinsic galaxy properties with environment (e.g. halo mass).
  • Compare the clustering properties of galaxies as a function of stellar mass, luminosity, HI gas content, etc.
  • Compare different estimators of star formation rate.
  • Investigate which types of galaxies contain active galactic nuclei.

Projects are mostly computational: database queries, data analysis, scripting.

Restrictions: Astro or Past students preferred.

Star formation in the distant universe using the Herschel Multi-Tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES)

Faculty advisor: Seb Oliver

The history of star formation is a crucial piece in the puzzle of galaxy formation and evolution. Most of the star formation activity is hidden from conventional telescopes by dust. Studying this obscured star formation was the main objective of the European Space Agency mission, Herschel which was operating from 2009 to 2013. The largest project on Herschel was the Herschel Multi-Tiered Extragalactic Survey (HerMES), which was coordinated by Seb Oliver at Sussex. This project has mapped 1000 square degrees of the sky and catalogued many hundreds of thousands of distant star forming galaxies. The hard work of understanding these maps and catalogues in detail has only just begun. In this project you will help with this international research project by testing different methods for estimating the star formation rate of galaxies and ultimately producing a catalogue of all the HerMES galaxies with their best star formation rates.

This project will be almost entirely computational. Familiarity with Unix/Linux would be an advantage. You will be using existing computer codes which come from different groups and written in different languages (e.g. Fortran, IDL, Python etc.). You will need to get these codes running on our Linux computer systems. You will need to assemble a test sample of galaxies and run the different codes on those samples. You will need to document this, so that another researcher could duplicate your findings and repeat for different or future revised catalogues. You will need to report on the differences between the codes. You will then assemble the full current catalogues and run these on our high performance computer cluster to get the final product.

Restrictions: The precise nature of the project (particularly if there is more than one student) may be adapted to fit the needs of the research project at the time and can be flexible depending on the interests and skills of the student(s).

Making galaxies: theoretical modelling of galaxy formation

Faculty advisor: Peter Thomas

The formation of galaxies is one of the outstanding problems in contemprary astrophysics. We understand how dark matter collapses under its own gravity to form small clumps that gradually merge together to form larger and larger 'galactic halos'. However, the simplest models of how galaxies form within these halos gives properties that disagree wildly with observations. It seems that we need huge amounts of feedback of energy from supernovae (exploding stars) and active galactic nuclei (supermassive black holes).

This project can be set at a variety of levels depending upon the experience of the student:

  • a review of galaxy formation models, their successes and failures
  • the use of an existing semi-analytic model to explore the effect of varying the parameters of the model
  • adapting an existing semi-analytic model to try to better reproduce the observations and/or give greater insight into the processes governing galaxy formation.

You will work with the latest observational data from large galaxy surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and simulations from the Virgo Supercomputing Consortium. You will learn skills such as: understanding astronomical literature; visulisation of data; modelling; writing code in MATLAB/IDL and C; presenting your results in scientific-style reports, posters and web pages. For a final-year student there will be opportunity to visit other instututions within the Consortium and give a short talk on your work.

Making a splash: Modelling water with smoothed-particle hydrodynamics

Faculty advisor: Peter Thomas

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is numerical technique for simlulating fluid flow in situations in which the geometry is rapidly changing. It has had huge success in astronomy in modelling gas flows in cosmology, galaxy formation, star and planet formation, etc. Recently, however, it has also been used to study water flows in situations where traditional grid-based codes fare badly: examples include the breaking of waves, flooding and dam-bursts. It has also been used to visualise water flows in films such as The Day After Tomorrow.

This project will use an existing SPH code written by myself that has been incredibly successful in astrophysics and which I am adapting to follow water flows. The precise nature of the project will evolve according to the experience of the student:

  • Initially, to use the existing code to model flows and to visualise the results
  • Then to adapt the code to optimise the parameters of the model
  • For an interested student, to work on parallelising the code for use on supercomputers
  • To undertake simulations of dam-breaks and flooding.

This is cutting-edge simulation work. By the end of the research placement students will be able to walk into any PhD in hydrodynamics with an enormous head start on any competitors. Skills that will be learned include: coding in scientific languages such as Fortran-95; parallel programming; visualisation using MATLAB/IDL; experience with simulations; presenting scientific results in written form, as a poster and on-line. There may be opportunity to visit collaborators in Nottingham. It is to be hoped that the final stages of the project work would be publishable and that the student will attend an appropriate conference and give a talk on their work.

Cosmology from the microwave background

Faculty advisor: Antony Lewis

The cosmic microwave background is being observed by the Planck satellite and gives us a glimpse of the universe when it was only a few 100,000 years old. You will study how to extract useful information from the data, make theoretical predictions and test theoretical models for the early universe and its evolution.

The inflationary model

Faculty advisor: David Seery

The inflationary model represents our present best understanding of conditions in the very early universe. It will soon be stringently tested by data returned from satellite probes and surveys of large-scale structure. However, methods to predict observables from inflation at a commensurate level of precision are still in development. In this project you will learn about inflation and apply what you know to help develop new predictive technology.

Depending on your interests, the skills you learn may include: understanding the scientific literature and presenting your results in a scientific style; coding and numerical analysis (probably C or C++); techniques in mathematical physics, including differential equations, and advanced mathematical methods; some elements of field theory or dynamical systems.

Signatures of cosmic reionisation

Faculty advisor: Ilian Iliev

After the Big Bang, the Universe expanded and cooled, turning the hot primordial plasma into a sea of neutral gas. This process started the period in the evolution of the universe referred to as the Cosmic "Dark Ages", during which there was no light in the Universe save the faint glow remaining from the Big Bang. The small density inhomogeneities left over from the period of fast initial expansion gradually grew under the force of gravity and eventually formed the first stars and galaxies. Their light ended the Dark Ages and slowly re-ionized the entire intergalactic medium by the time the universe was about 1 billion years old. In this project, you will work with data from state-of-the-art numerical simulations, learning how to extract observable signatures from it and make predictions for observatories like the Low Frequence Array (LOFAR), a current pan-European collaboration.

Largely computing, plus learning about the physics of reionisation, radio interferometer observations and possibly about parallel computing.

Restrictions: An affinity to programming/computer work is expected.

Calibrating a small radio telescope

Faculty advisor: Steve Churchwell

The department has purchased a small (3m diameter) radio telescope for use in the MPhys lab. This telescope is currently still being assembled but must be ready for use by the end of the summer. It is hoped that the summer can be used to allign, calibrate and test the telescope.

The project will involve a fair amount of electronics (RF mostly), some mechanical work adjusting the receiver to its optimum position above the dish, some surveying to determine the correct alignment, and finally some actual observing to run through the options for MPhys experiments.

Fishing for EELSs (Extreme Emission Line Sources)

Faculty advisor: Stephen Wilkins

Extreme Emission Lines Sources (EELSs) are extragalactic objects whose broadband photometry is heavily influenced by extremely strong nebular emission lines. The results of previous observations studies so far appear to suggest that EELSs are star forming galaxies in which the majority of the UV-optical-NIR light is produced by a very young population of stars, indicative of very recent (<30 Myr) star formation. These properties make EELSs an interesting laboratory to test our understanding of the processes responsible for star formation.

This project has the potential to continue for several years depending on the outcomes at various stages. In the first instance the student will be expected to design a selection criteria aimed at identifying intermediate redshift EELSs which can then be applied to deep near-infrared and optical data from both the UltraVISTA survey and the Canada France Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). Later on in the project it may be possible to extend this analysis by obtaining new observations from other observatories. The project will be almost entirely computing in nature and will heavily make use of the Python programming language and some specific astronomical software.