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: 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: 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: 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: 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 […]

PI: Alison Young Planets form in the discs of dusty gas that surround young stars. However, it has been a surprise for astronomers to find protoplanets already present within protoplanetary discs that are just a million years old. This suggests that planet formation must begin very early, probably as soon as the protoplanetary disc forms. […]

PI: Kai Hou Yip Our Dirac project has been focusing on exploring the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning in helping us to explore the strange worlds of exoplanets. In particular, the field is now receiving much better quality data from JWST, but our data analysis is struggling to comprehensively analyse the data with […]

PI: Harley Katz The first billion years of cosmic history witnessed the birth of the first galaxies, the enrichment of the interstellar medium with heavy elements, and the reionization of the Universe. While JWST is now revealing glimpses of this era via deep imaging and spectra, interpreting this data requires sophisticated theoretical models that self-consistently […]

PI: Will Handley One of the most fundamental open questions in modern physics is the nature of dark matter (DM), the invisible substance making up about 85% of the matter in the Universe. While we know DM exists due to its gravitational effects on visible matter, we have yet to identify the particle(s) responsible. A […]