I am a SkyMapper Postdoctoral Fellow at the Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics in Canberra. During 2013-14 I was a Gliese Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. My research interests are broadly centred around identifying and characterising some of the youngest stars in the solar neighbourhood. These nearby young stars are ideal laboratories in which to study:
The star formation history of the Solar neighbourhood
The physical conditions required for star formation, and
whether these are the same throughout the Galaxy
How the dusty disks around young stars evolve
How groups of young stars dissolve into the Galaxy
To answer these questions I use data from a variety of telescopes, including the latest all-sky surveys. I also have an active interest in the international Virtual Observatory effort, which is developing standards for the discovery, exchange and analysis of astronomical data. I completed my Ph.D. at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 2012.
…for a more technical description of my work, see my research page.
Recent Publications
Deacon, N. R., Schlieder, J. E. & Murphy, S. J., 2016, MNRAS accepted
arXiv: 1601.06162
Murphy, S. J., Lawson, W. A. & Bento, J., 2015, MNRAS, 453, 2220
arXiv: 1507.08002
Zhou et al., 2015, MNRAS, 451, 2263
arXiv: 1505.02860
Murphy, S. J. & Lawson, W. A., 2015, MNRAS, 447, 1267
arXiv: 1411.5703
Kennedy, G. M., Murphy, S. J., Lisse, C. M., Menard, F., Sitko, M. L. et al. 2014, MNRAS, 438, 3299
arXiv: 1312.4531
…more on my publications page.
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Mount Stromlo Observatory
Cotter Road
Weston Creek ACT 2611
Australia
(Map)
📞+61 (02) 612 50246
simon.murphy.nz
☆Latest Paper
Artist's depiction of 2MASS J2126-8140 with its parent star faintly visible in the background. (Credit: Neil James Cook/Uni. of Hertfordshire)
Niall Deacon (Hertfordshire), Josh Schlieder (NASA Ames) and I recently discovered that two previously known young objects, the M dwarf TYC 9486-927-1 and the L3 brown dwarf 2MASS J2126-8140, are in fact co-distant (32 pc), co-moving and form a 6900 AU wide pair. Using a new spectroscopic 10–45 Myr age for TYC 9486, we calculate that 2MASS J2126 is a gas giant planet or low-mass brown dwarf of 11–15 Jupiter masses. This makes it by far the widest known planetary mass companion and a much wider analogue to the well-studied exoplanet Beta Pictoris b.
You can read the paper on arXiv, and here is a chart I made for The Age newspaper to illustrate how wide 2MASS J2126's orbit actually is:
✈Travel Schedule
6‐10 June, 2016
Cool Stars 19, Uppsala, Sweden
3–8 July, 2016
ASA Annual Scientific Meeting, Sydney
Background image credit: Akira Fujii