SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS

PI: Roman Rafikov Project dp326, which started in April of 2024, is devoted to exploring the properties of the boundary layers – narrow interface regions at the inner edges of accretion discs, where the rapidly rotating gas gets slowed down before joining the star. Our study focuses on exploring a particular mechanism of angular momentum […]

PI: Miguel Bezares This project explores gravitational waves (GWs) generated by the mergers of binary systems containing neutron stars (NS), including binary black holes (BBH), binary neutron star (BNS) and black hole–neutron star (BH–NS) mergers. These extreme events are crucial for testing both general relativity and alternative theories of gravity. The work involves fully general-relativistic […]

PI: Prof. Justin I. Read In the EDGE project – Engineering Dwarfs at Galaxy Formation’s EDGE – we simulate the smallest stellar systems at an unprecedented spatial resolution of just ~10 light years. At this resolution, we resolve the formation of realistic, dense, star clusters through to the present day, in their full cosmological context, […]

PI: Florian Beutler In 2024, we launched a project focused on advancing the data analysis of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), with the goal of incorporating higher-order clustering statistics into the core DESI cosmological analysis. DESI is collecting the distances of about 40 million galaxies. The 3D clustering of these galaxies contains a wealth […]

PI: Celine Guervilly Spectacular cyclonic structures were discovered in the polar regions of Jupiter by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in 2016. These polar cyclones are vast in size, long-lived, and arranged in clusters of five and eight circumpolar vortices around a larger polar vortex at the south and north poles respectively. This arrangement has essentially remained […]

PI: Joanna Barstow Uncovering signs of an Io-like exoplanet With the discovery of almost 6000 exoplanets to date, an emerging class of particular interest is the subset of planets that sit between the Earth and Neptune in mass. Some of these objects, for which no example exists in the solar system, are likely to be […]

PI: Laura Currie All stars transport at least some of their energy by convection but one issue when modelling stellar convection is that it occurs over a vast range of spatial and temporal scales and so simulation over stellar timescales is not possible. Therefore, stellar structure models rely on parametrisations of the convection. Commonly used […]

PI: Henrik Latter Protoplanetary disks are the birth environments for planetary systems, and hence of life more generally. They are also highly complex and dynamic magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows, containing a hot turbulent inner region close to the star and a cooler laminar region further away. The work carried out under DiRAC grant dp316, building on […]

PI: Simon Daley-Yates We have numerically demonstrated that simulated cool star coronae naturally form condensations. If the star rotates slowly, with a co-rotation radius greater than the Alfv'{e}n radius (i.e. RK > RA), these condensations will form below the co-rotation radius RK and simply fall back to the stellar surface as coronal rain. If, however, […]

PI: Dr Phil Bull (University of Manchester) Neutral hydrogen gas is the raw material of star formation, and is ubiquitous across cosmic time. The presence of neutral hydrogen, and how is is distributed in space, can tell us about the processes that helped form the first galaxies, as well as tracing the way that (otherwise […]