Investigating disequilibrium chemistry and photoionization in hot Jupiter atmospheres
PI: Joanna Barstow Project: Developing the NEMESIS retrieval code for studying exoplanets II Of the exoplanets we have been able to study in detail to date, the majority are in very close orbits around their parent stars, meaning they experience extremes in radiation environment and temperature. Over the last few years, observations with the James […]
Origins of the Water Ice Excavated by the Christmas Eve Crater Formation on Mars
PI: Gareth Collins On the 24th of December 2021, a bus-sized meteoroid struck the martian surface, producing a 150-m wide crater. The impact excavated an extensive field of m-scale blocks of water ice—the lowest-latitude water ice observed on Mars to date. We used 3D computer simulations of the formation of the crater performed on DiRAC […]
Leading and trailing spirals in planet-forming discs
PI: Richard Alexander Young stars are surrounded by cold discs of dust and gas, which form because gas clouds invariably “spin up” as they collapse to form stars. These so-called protoplanetary discs are the sites of exoplanet formation. In recent years observations with telescopes such as ALMA have revealed a wealth of structure in planet-forming […]
Planets from Building Blocks to Habitable Atmospheres
PI: Felix Sainsbury-Martinez The exo/astrochemistry group at the University of Leeds has been using Dirac HPC resources to study planet formation on multiple scales, from protoplanetary discs to planetary atmospheres, with a focus on the role that ices play. As of February 2026, we have two papers under-review with ApJ and two papers being prepared […]
Spectroscopy of exoplanets in the era of JWST (aka Hydrocarbon cross-sections)
PI: Sergey Yurchenko Our 2025 programme delivered a coordinated set of spectroscopic and photochemical data products that directly enable robust interpretation of exoplanet and planetary atmospheres, especially for retrieval frameworks and for high-resolution cross-correlation spectroscopy (HRCCS). The work is united by a single technical requirement: extremely large, high-accuracy molecular datasets (line lists, empirical energies, pressure […]
The Streaming Instability in Gravitationally Unstable Protostellar Discs
PI: Ken Rice The goal of this project was to understand the evolution of solids in gravitationally unstable protostellar discs. It’s becoming increasingly clear that planet formation starts during the earliest stages of star formation when these discs are also susceptible to the gravitational instability. Therefore, it seems likely that this phase may play a […]
Monte Carlo in diagram space fornuclear reactions
PI: Matteo Vorabbi Ab initio nuclear theory has achieved significant advances, enabling predictive calculations of structure observables in medium-, heavy-, and deformed nuclei directly from QCD consistent theories of the nuclear force. However, the microscopic description of nuclear reactions remains a major open challenge and requires new cutting-edge computational techniques on that can exploit large […]
The emergence of globular clusters and globular-cluster-like dwarfs
PI: Prof. Justin I. Read In the EDGE project – Engineering Dwarfs at Galaxy Formation’s EDGE (dp324) – we simulate the smallest stellar systems at an unprecedented spatial resolution of just ~10 light years. At this resolution, we have resolved the formation of realistic, dense, globular star clusters through to the present day, in their […]
Free Floating Planets and FU Ori outbursts in star and planet formation
PI: Sergei Nayakshin Capture and escape of planetary mean-motion resonances in turbulent discs Mean-motion resonances (MMRs) form through convergent disc migration of planet pairs, which may be disrupted by dynamical instabilities after protoplanetary disc (PPD) dispersal. This scenario is supported by recent analysis of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data showing that neighbouring planet […]
COSMOPOWER Emulators for Euclid DR1 Cosmological Inference
PI: Alessio Spurio Mancini The Euclid space telescope, launched in July 2023, is carrying out the most ambitious cosmological survey to date, mapping billions of galaxies across one-third of the sky. Extracting precise cosmological constraints from Euclid Data Release 1 (DR1) requires running the theoretical prediction pipeline millions of times within Bayesian inference frameworks — […]