Searching for Tatooine: the PAVO Planet Hunt
The new PAVO instruments, just brought online at the SUSI and CHARA arrays, have now achieved the highest sensitivity and resolution ever obtained. With this PhD project, you will develop a new astrometric interferometer mode for PAVO at the SUSI telescope which will probe nearby bright binary star systems for planetary companions. Double star systems have been largely overlooked in conventional planet hunts to date (they are problematic), but our high precision methods exploit the properties of the binary to make the extremely high precision measurements needed to reveal the presence of planets. This challenging and ambitious project is among the key objectives for the facility. You will participate in the design and construction of advanced optical instrumentation, and then set the experiment in motion by leading an observational program targeting a handful of bright southern binary stars. Success in finding a planet in even one of these systems would be a signature result, commanding attention from the astronomical community worldwide.

Galactic Paleontology with Metal Poor Stars
Ultra metal-poor stars are the living fossils of the stellar kingdom. Although elements heavier than Helium only make up a tiny fraction of any star, they have a profound effect on the stellar structure. Consequently stars born when the universe was substantially younger, before heavy elements were formed, should stand out from the crowd exhibiting dramatically different physical and thermal structure -- or so the theoretical models tell us. Because these fossil stars are rare and far from Earth, nobody has ever been able to examine one in detail. Until now. Your job in this project will put these stars under the microscope using the most powerful imaging arrays ever built: The Sydney University Stellar Interferometer and the CHARA array in Southern California. In making the first accurate measurements of the basic properties of metal-poor stars, you will determine whether these exotic objects are indeed as weird as theorists predict. The project then takes direct aim at one of the key questions in cosmology: the lithium abundance of very old stars is significantly lower than Big-Bang nucleosynthesis predicts. Where is the missing Lithium hiding, or is this a chink in the armour for Big-Bang cosmology?

The stellar surface imaging project
The twin PAVO instruments (PAVO is the Southern constellation of the Peacock) have just been commissioned at the SUSI (NSW) and CHARA (California) arrays. These instruments now set the standard for sensitivity and resolution in optical interferometic imaging, for the first time enabling us to answer a question which countless generations must have dreamed about: ``What would it look like if I could zoom up to see a distant star at close quarters?''. The sunspots and prominences exhibited by our own sun may be quite tame in comparison with the fireworks displayed by many of the exotic stars in our galaxy. The surfaces of several classes of strongly magnetic star should show strong surface mottling, with spectacular patterns of light and dark regions criss-crossing the stellar disk. Still other stars are distorted from the normal circular disk by rotation rates approaching break-up, or by tidal effects from an extremely close binary companion star stretching the surface into an egg shape. New observations, for the first time enabled by the PAVO instruments, will open a unique new window into the exotic physics which governs such extreme astrophysical environments. In this project, you will learn about design of leading edge astronomical instrumentation, construct your own observing program and conduct observations at both the SUSI array in Narrabri and the CHARA array in California.

The Riddle of the Red Square
The "Red Square" is a spectacular, newly-discovered bipolar nebula (Tuthill et al, Science 2007). Using cutting-edge imaging techniques such as Adaptive Optics and Optical Interferometry implemented at some of the worlds largest observatories (e.g. Keck, Gemini), we have revealed beautiful and startlingly detailed structures. A striking set of rungs crossing the nebula imply the existence of a highly regular series of nested bicones: possibly a relic of previous episodes of eruption or instability in the host star MWC 922 at the heart of the system. What is particularly compelling about this object is the correspondence between the sharp rung structures we see in The Red Square, and the beautiful polar rings now exhibited by the only naked-eye supernova since the invention of the telescope: SN 1987A. The origin of these mysterious rings stands out as one of the foremost unsolved problems in Supernova astronomy, and in the Red Square, we may have found the best example of a candidate progenitor for these structures. For this project, you will unravel the physics of this fascinating target and participate in new observing programs for the Keck telescopes (Hawaii) and VLT telescopes (Chile). In revealing the true nature of the enigmatic star MWC 922, we hope to solidify the links between this new nebula and the relic structures around SN 1987A. More information on the Red Square is on this page.

Detecting close Exoplanets in young southern stars
Methods of detecting planets by direct imaging have produced only a small handful of controversial discoveries (as opposed to the hundreds of planets found with indirect methods such as radial velocity searches). One of the main reasons for this is that conventional technology, such as an Adaptive Optics Coronagraph, is only sensitive to planets at large separations from their host star: much larger than seen in our own solar system for example. With this project, you will use a new high-resolution imaging technique which focusses on imaging planets where they are expected to be, in close Jupiter or Saturn-like orbits around young host stars in the constellation of Hydra. This project has been awarded 2.5 nights of observing time at the European VLT telescope in Chile. No other technique has had the power to probe the rich southern skies for planets to this level of precision before, making this an area ripe for new discoveries.

Getting to know the Neighbors: High precision astrophysics in the Pleiades and Hyades
Precision measurement lies at the heart of physics, yet the distance scale to some of the nearest star clusters (and thence outwards to the universe) has been notoriously difficult to pin down. In this project, you will bring the extraordinary new power of optical interferometry with the CHARA array in California to finally nail this problem. By observing binary star systems at unprecedented resolution, you will match the precise orbital data with radial velocities and therefore obtain a completely model-independent, high precision distance to the crucial Pleiades and Hyades star clusters. The controversy in the distances to these clusters, which are key laboratories for a range of stellar physics, clouds our understanding of basic stellar evolution and even the cosmological distance scale itself.

Building a Robotic Eye for SUSI: Automated Sensitive Infrared All-Sky Monitoring
The Astrophysical Imaging group are roboticizing the SUSI array in Narrabri, northwestern NSW. The first steps towards remote operation have already been made, with full automation of the array planned, making it possible to undertake larger astrophysics projects focusing on associated groups of stars rather than individual stars. Although SUSI has always been designed to operate robotically for periods of time, with many dozens of sensors and actuators feeding into a distributed computer network, a live astronomer has always been required to determine if the sky is clear, and to choose what target to observe. In this project, you will develop an all-sky monitoring system that analyzes in real time the apparent brightness of ~100 of the brightest stars and makes a decision on whether to open SUSI's siderostats. Data gathered by this continuously operating camera will also be used to measure the light curve of the bright but neglected M giant star gamma Crucis, placing it clearly within the context of the well-studied M giants in the large Magellanic cloud.

Galactic big game hunting: hot massive stars and supergiants
In the stellar eco-system, the hot massive luminous stars at the top dominate the galaxy. Exceeding our own sun by factors of five in temperature, fifty in mass, and fifty-thousand in luminosity, these T-Rex's of the stellar kingdom dominate many aspects of the physics of the galaxy, despite being outnumbered thousands to one by more normal stars. When we look at a distant galaxy, the light we see mostly comes from a handful of these overachievers, outshining the teeming multitudes of low-mass stars. Massive stars exhibit a range of fascinating physics not seen elsewhere, driving intense stellar winds and ending their lives in cataclysmic supernova explosions. However these rare and exotic stars have proved very difficult to study because there are none close enough with well-characterized basic properties to get a strong handle on the physics. Your job in this project will be to make some of the first precise mass measurements of a range of high-mass stars. You will use data from the SUSI array operated by the School of Physics, and the CHARA array in Southern California to image these stars at unprecedented scales of resolution.