Astro

Astrophysics

 

James E Owen and Nouhman Altaf

A slim disc approach to external photoevaporation of discs' Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 508, Issue 2, pp.2493-2504


 Steve Weatherley

This paper began life as a first-year undergraduate project. It was later written up once Steve started a PhD here at Imperial.


Jonathan Holdship and Brent Morris
These 4th year MSci students reduced data from the ESO VLT that contributed to this paper’s multi wavelength study of a candidate high redshift galaxy cluster.


Suzu Sato and Ana Portela Fonseca
These students converted the Planck observations of the all-sky Cosmic microwave Background into a 3D printer model where the temperature fluctuations that were the seeds of all structure in the universe can be felt as lumps and bumps on the surface of a sphere. This work was been featured in Physics World, The New York Times, Wired, The Mail Online and elsewhere.


Sakina Ali-Khan
This paper found that the location of supernova explosions within their host galaxy matters when we try to use them to measure the expansion history of the cosmos. Sakina Ali-Khan was in her second year at Imperial when she worked on this project during the summer with Dr Roberto Tratta and a team including Imperial PhD students, UG students from other universities as well as a sixth former.


Damien de Mijolla and Alvise Vianello

Damien and Alvise investigated a new idea to solve an emerging problem in the analysis of ‘big data’ experiments such as will come from the next generation of cosmological surveys undertaken by the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission and the US-led LSST project. In order to analyse the vast amount of data generated with existing techniques, an unfeasibly large number of computer simulations of the Universe are needed, with numbers up to a billion being quoted. Using a massive data compression algorithm developed by their supervisor, they were able to show that the number of simulations can be reduced, by a factor of up to a million, using this and an emulation technique.  The paper was accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.


Several Imperial UGs, as well as IROP students, have been part of this original piece of research investigating the influence of location within the host galaxy on supernova type Ia brightness. The results have been published in one of the top astrophysics journals .