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RSAA Research Projects for PhD, Honours, and PhB students

This webpage gives a list of research projects that are currently available at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Projects are suitable for undergraduate Astronomy, Physics, and Maths students who are enrolled in the ANU PhB program, or national and international students who are planning to do their PhD or Honours year at RSAA. For more information please contact the individual project supervisor, the , or the

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Mass Feeding and Feedback in Young Stellar Objects

Supervisors: Target Group: PhB, Honours, and PhD students

Ever wonder how solar-mass stars form and why all the solar planets lie in a plane? Paradoxically, outflows are a prominent feature of star formation. In order for material to accrete onto a protostar it has to lose angular momentum. The angular momentum of a large natal cloud leads to the formation of a circumstellar disk and inner accretion disk as the cloud collapses. Planets ultimately form in the disk - hence the solar planets lie in a plane. Winds generated in the inner disk or close to the stellar surface (we don't know which) expel material along the disk rotation axis. These micro-jets of expelled material are seen as arcsecond-scale elongated outflows in forming T Tauri stars. We believe that these outflows are magnetically driven and that angular momentum is carried away in the partially-ionized flow through the coupling between the magnetic field and the gas. This loss of angular momentum acts as a throttle to control the rate at which other material can accrete onto the star and build up its mass.

We are investigating how these processes occur, both theoretically and observationally. Our goal is to couple the disk-wind parameters from accretion-disk models with the outflow simulations in order to reproduce the detail seen in our NIFS adaptive-optics-corrected integral-field spectrograph data. We already know that T Tauri star jets entrain little of the surrounding envelope material, so the micro-jet emission is largely from material expelled directly from the inner disk region. Marginal observational evidence for axial rotation of the micro-jet has been claimed by others. If true, this supports the disk wind hypothesis. Our NIFS data can address this important issue.

A range of projects associated with this work can be offered at different levels (PhB, Hon, PhD). They will appeal to students with strong mathematical and computing skills who have an interest in modelling and drawing comparisons with observations. For more information download the project description (here) and contact one of the supervisors.

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The Stromlo Missing Satellites (SMS) Survey

Supervisors: Target Group: PhD and Honours students

Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory was considered a triumph of theoretical astrophysics. Today it must be regarded as incomplete, a mere stepping stone to something better.

Dr Helmut Jerjen from RSAA assembled a specialist team of 12 international scientists from eight research institutions (ANU, Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard Universities, Universities of Cape Town, Bonn, Michigan, and Arizona, and the European Southern Observatory) to resolve a long-standing discrepancy between the CDM paradigm and galaxy observations: the Milky Way should be surrounded by hundreds of dark matter mini halos and their optical manifestation, the dwarf satellite galaxies. However, only 22 such satellites have been detected to date which stronlgy suggests that theory is flawed in its ability to describe the matter distribution in the Universe on galaxy size scales.

Inspired by the success of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey pilot project in the Northern hemisphere the SMS team will carry out the deepest, most extended search for missing Milky Way satellites covering the entire Southern hemisphere over the next five years. We will analyse 150 Terabytes of digital images from the state-of-the-art ANU SkyMapper telescope with sophisticated data mining tools. Extensive observations of newly discovered satellites with the most powerful optical, infrared, and radio telescopes in the world will follow to obtain an unprecedented picture of the physical phenomenon dwarf satellite and stringent observational constraints to uncover flaws in CDM theory.

The Stromlo Missing Satellites team is currently looking for enthusiastic PhD and Honours students with a strong background in Mathematics and Physics who want to be involved in the SMS project to tackle some of the most fundamental questions in near-field cosmology. Please contact for further details.

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Clearing the Atmosphere for the Giant Magellan Telescope

Supervisor: Target Group: Honours and PhB students

The Giant Magellan Telescope (in which the ANU is a partner) will be located on Campanas Peak in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. The properties of the atmosphere at this site are crucial for the design of the telescope, and a group of scientists from RSAA has built and used a device called a SLODAR to measure the height and strength of atmospheric turbulence at the site. An earlier version of the technique is described here. It turns out that the turbulence seems to be mostly located in very thin layers, which is quite surprising and could be exploited to enhance the performance of the telescope. However, this result depends on the mathematical method that is used to extract the "layers" from the data. It turns out that the problem is very similar to one that appears in oil exploration, where thin layers of oil or gas are detected underground using seismic data. This project will adapt these sophisticated signal processing methods to look "up" rather than down, to decide if the Andean atmosphere really is as remarkable as it seems.

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The Chemical Evolution of the Universe

Supervisor: , Chiaki Kobayashi (RSAA) and Lisa Kewley (U. Hawaii). Target Group: Honours and PhD students

To understand how galaxies in the early universe evolved into those that we see locally requires an understanding of the chemical and star formation history of galaxies over cosmic time. Large spectroscopic redshift surveys have sparked an enormous effort aimed at elucidating the star formation history of galaxies, but we still lack a solid understanding of the chemical history of galaxies. This has now become a major driver of astronomical research.

Cosmological simulations such as those by Kobayashi can now predict the evolution of chemical abundances in galaxies. These lack a solid observational ground because: (1) a solid local benchmark sample is lacking, (2) there are insufficient observations of galaxies at early epochs, and (3) the absolute calibration of the chemical abundance scale is currently discrepant by more than a factor of two.

The aim of the proposed research project is to gain an unprecedented understanding of the chemical history of galaxies by exploiting the capabilities of the new Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) supported by the theory developed by the project supervisors.

More details can be found here.

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Old Galactic Novae Shells

Supervisor: and Bob Williams (STScI) Target Group: Honours students

We propose to make WiFeS observations of four old nova shells to investigate their kinematics and physical conditions and to derive the degree of mixing and the chemical abundances from the analysis of their recombination line spectra.

More details can be found here.

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Dynamics & Chemical Abundances in Young SNR

Supervisor: and Ralph Sutherland (RSAA) Target Group: Honours students

Objectives: To observe Young Supernova Remnants (YSNR) in order to directly test theories of nucleosynthesis in massive stars, draw conclusions on the mixing of material during the supernova explosion, derive dynamical ages and to search for evidence of the "jet ejection" expected if these objects were associated with a Gamma-Ray Burst, even when this was not aligned with the line of sight.

More details can be found here.

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The Spinning Sun

Supervisor: Target Group: 1st and 2nd Yr ANU students

The sun does not rotate as a rigid body. It is a gas from its outermost layers down to its centre. The equatorial region of the photosphere rotates faster than do regions at higher and lower latitudes. This is called differential rotation. The differential rotation of the Sun's latitudes causes its magnetic field lines to become twisted together over time, causing magnetic field loops to erupt from the Sun's surface and trigger the formation of the Sun's dramatic sunspots and solar prominences. We are analysing a time series of images from the SOHO Michelson Doppler Imager to measure the rotation speed of the sun and to find evidence for the differential rotation.

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Dark Matter in Spiral Galaxies

Supervisor: Target Group: 1st and 2nd Yr ANU students

When studying spiral galaxies it is found that the stellar rotation velocity in the disk remains constant, or flat, with increasing distance away from the galactic center. This result is highly counterintuitive since, based on Newton's law of gravity, the rotational velocity is expected to steadily decrease for stars further away from the galactic center. Analogously, inner planets within the Solar System travel more quickly about the Sun than do the outer planets. One way to speed up the outer planets would be to add more mass between them. By the same argument the flat galactic rotation curves seem to suggest that each galaxy is embedded in a massive, roughly spherical halo of dark matter. Your colleague from the European Southern Observatory sent you three sets of spectroscopic data from the 3.5m New Technology Telescope for the galaxies NGC6810 and ESO240-G011. He asked you to analyse the spectra to work out how much dark matter is in these two galaxies.

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