The MandelZoom project: unravelling the elusive intermediate-mass black holes in dwarf galaxies
PI: Debora Sijacki While mounting observational evidence suggests that intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) may play an important role in shaping the properties of dwarf galaxies, both at high redshift and in the local Universe, our theoretical understanding of how these IMBHs form and grow remains largely incomplete. IMBHs, with masses ranging from a hundred to […]
Primordial Gravitational Waves from Domain Wall Networks
PI: Paul Shellard Since the recent detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) by PTAs (pulsar timing arrays) there has been renewed interest in their potential primordial origin due to violent processes in the early universe. One of these alternatives for generating gravitational waves is through the collapse and demise of networks of domain […]
Constraining Fuzzy Dark Matter with 21-cm cosmology
PI: Anastasia Fialkov Project Contributors: A. Fialkov (PI), J. Dhandha, T. Gessey-Jones, S. Pochinda, A. Tocher (University of Cambridge) How Fuzzy Dark Matter Disrupts the Birth of the First Stars The Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm struggles with small-scale galactic discrepancies. Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM) composed of ultra-light axions offers a compelling alternative, utilizing macroscopic […]
The COSMOS-Web Lens Survey
PI: James Nightingale The COSMOS-Web Lens Survey (COWLS) uses deep imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover and study strong gravitational lenses across the 0 . 54 deg 2 COSMOS-Web field. In our recent work (arXiv:2503.08777) , we present a sample of over 100 strong lens candidates identified in JWST/NIRCam data. These […]
Optimising modelling and data selection for late-time cosmology with galaxy surveys
PI: Dr Dani Leonard, co-Is: Dr Markus Rau, Dr Cora Uhlemann Optimised modelling for precision cosmology with LSST and Euclid Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the European Space Agency’s Euclid satellite are both at the beginning of multi-year surveys which will deliver cosmological galaxy samples at unprecedented sky coverage and […]
On the rapid growth of black holes in high-redshift galaxies
PI: Adrianne Slyz (co-PI Mahsa Sanati) Despite the vast amount of energy released by active galactic nuclei (AGNs), their role in early galaxy formation and in regulating the growth of black holes (BHs) remains poorly understood. Motivated by new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of high redshift quasars residing in dwarf-mass galaxies, in dp016 […]
Internally Heated and Cooled Simulations of Stellar Convection
PI: Matthew Bate Project: High Performance Computing Support for Exeter Astrophysics Our team has performed numerical simulations of Boussinesq convection using DIaL-3 and Cosma-8, considering 2D and 3D Cartesian box, and 3D Spherical shell geometries. These simulations are intended to be idealised representations of stellar interior convection. In this type of model, where convection is […]
Higher-order and multi-tracer clustering analyses of the DESI galaxy survey
PI: Florian Beutler We are in the midst of analysing Data Release 2 (DR2) from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI is the world’s leading galaxy redshift survey: by measuring redshifts (and hence distances) for an enormous number of galaxies and quasars (about 50 million), it maps the three ‑ dimensional matter distribution of […]
Thermal, suprathermal, and energetic particle dynamics in space plasmas
PI: Luca Franci Although particles are accelerated to high energy throughout the universe, the underlying mechanisms are still not fully understood. Uncovering particle energisation is key for solving open issues in the heliosphere (e.g., solar wind origin and acceleration) and in astrophysical systems (e.g., interactions of stellar winds with exoplanetary magnetospheres), and for forecasting extreme […]
Dynamos in the Solar System
PI: Robert Teed Our project highlight was the research conducted using DiRAC that led to the publication: Teed, Robert J. and Dormy, Emmanuel (2025) Scaling of strong-field spherical dynamos. Geophysical Research Letters, 52(20), (doi: 10.1029/2025GL118078) For this work we used approximately 200 kCPUh of time on DiRAC. Numerical experiments of dynamo action are designed to understand the generation of Earth’s dipolar magnetic […]