Astrophysics wins facility time

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Posted on 14 January 2011

Keele PhD students Mandy Bailey and Masha Lakicevic, with their supervisor Dr Jacco van Loon each won an award of six nights of observing time on the European Southern Observatory's 3.5m New Technology Telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile. Mandy will measure absorption of starlight by molecules residing in the bubble of warm gas through which the Solar System currently travels, while Masha will image the emission from iron and molecular hydrogen in the gas remnants of recent supernova explosions in the Magellanic Clouds.

STFC Advanced Fellow John Taylor was awarded four nights on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope at La Palma and five nights on the 3.5m telescope at Calar Alto, both in Spain. John will measure the variations in velocity of stars that orbit each other and for which the Kepler satellite has shown that they eclipse each other, thereby obtaining very accurate measurements of the properties of these stars.

Professor Rob Jeffries and Dr Pierre Maxted were awarded four nights on the Nordic Optical Telescope, at La Palma, to investigate a population of very young stars that have been found as a by-product of the SuperWASP survey for transiting extrasolar planets.

Dr James Reeves and PhD student Jason Gofford were awarded 336 kilo-seconds of time on the XMM-Newton satellite, overcoming an over-subscription of approximately 7:1. The aims of the program are to perform X-ray spectroscopy of the outflow from the super-massive black hole in the quasar MR 2251-178. The observations will be co-ordinated with previously approved Chandra and HST observations.

Professor Nye Evans with PhD student Sarah Day, got nine shifts of beamtime on beamline I11 at the Diamond Light Source. The project is to use the intense X-rays available at Diamond to study CaCO3 formation in non-aqueous environments by solid-gas carbonation of silicates. This has relevance to the formation of carbonate particles in astrophysical environments, such as the early Solar System, planetary surfaces and evolved stars.

The financial value assigned by STFC to the groundbased facility time for the purposes of RAE/REF metrics, is £377,000.

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