Geraint
is the head of the Gravitational Astrophysics Group at USyd.
When not asleep at the telescope, his research includes cosmology,
general relativity, gravitational lensing, galactic cannibalism and
basically anything else that interests him.
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Peter
is working on numerical simulations of turbulent disk accretion
and magnetised outflows around black holes. These objects can produce
spectacular jets as well as X-ray and gamma-ray emission in the nuclei
of active galaxies and smaller-scale accreting sources such as X-ray
binaries. They are common in the universe but we have much to learn
about the physical processes that drive them.
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Juliana
is a PhD student in theoretical cosmology. Her main area of
interest is large scale structure, in particular how its rate of growth
can be measured from amplifications in the power spectrum induced by
the peculiar motion of galaxies. A measurement of the growth rate of
structure formation would allow us to distinguish between a number of
proposed modifications to general relativity with the aim of
understanding the origin of cosmic acceleration. Juliana has also
investigated the ability of an inhomogeneous cosmological model, such
as
the Timescape Cosmology, to fit the currently available observational
data. She has found that the Timescape Cosmology is generally a much
poorer fit to the Hubble diagram when compared to the standard
cosmological model.
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Scott
is a computational physicist currently involved in modelling the
effects of dark energy alongside Matt. Although there is thought to be
much more dark energy than dark or baryonic matter in the universe
there
is a poor understanding of how it might behave. Scott's other interests
include general relativity and quantum physics.
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Hugh
works in computational gravitational microlensing; he has
implemented a supercomputer version of a microlensing simulation tool
so that it uses parallelism, distributed memory and file caching. Using
this he is investigating various real lensed quasars to test models of
quasar structure, lens galaxy structure, and the properties of dark
matter. This is achieved by running simulations, getting data, and
testing them against observations, or making predictions as to future
observations. The work is being published as results become available,
the new supercomputer simulation program has already been described in
an article in New Astronomy journal.
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Holly is studying the formation
of the large scale structure of the
universe. Currently, she is looking at how dark matter structure
influences the spins
of galaxies and using N-body simulations to do
cosmology. She is also interested in theories of gravity and dark
energy. Holly is a Sagittarius and out of all the fundamental forces,
her favorite is gravity.
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Tom is working on the growth of
supermassive black holes and their role
in galaxy evolution. His research involves the use of N-body
simulations to quantify the effectiveness of processes like dynamical
friction, three body
scattering and gravitational recoil at various
stages in the history of the universe. At present there is a multitude
of formation theories for these massive bodies which appear to lie at
the heart of all galaxies, however little distinction can be made due
to a lack of observable evidence.
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Prajwal
is studying the evolution of Galaxy through Galactic
Archaeology . He is currently looking at the behaviour of the
stellar halo of our own Galaxy. His work will address the quest of
whether halo is rotating and/or counter-rotating with respect to the
galactic disk. Will there any smooth component of halo that remain
behind if all the known stellar streams are masked?, is the next
question he will be addressing soon.
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Foivos is trying to understand a
bit more, what's this thing called
dark matter. His research focuses on the analysis of kinematics of
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies and globular clusters, through dynamical
theories and Bayesian statistics methods. He is also passionately and
incurably in love with advanced mathematics and his natural
environment: liquid space, and feels gratitude for he found plenty of
both in Sydney.
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Anthony
is a student at Macquarie University working with Geraint on data from
the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey (PAndAS). His PhD research is
concerned with developing a robust, Bayesian algorithm capable of
locating the tip of the red giant branch with consistant accuracy of
better than 0.05 magnitudes. This is now up and running and in the
process of being applied to the various substructures in the M31 halo
in an effort to accurately obtain their distances. |
Magda Guglielmo is a
postgraduate student and has recently joined our
group.
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Francesca is a
PhD student investigating how gravitational lensing can be used to
estimate the amount of dark matter in the universe. Her main
interest is theoretical cosmology, ranging from the differential
geometry of various spacetimes to properties of dark energy. She
spent her Honours year getting her hands dirty with numerical
simulations, using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods to estimate the
fractional matter and dark energy content of the universe and
investigating non-ΛCDM dark energy models. Her present
research focuses on gravitational microlensing for cosmological
purposes.
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