Keele UniversityFaculty of Natural Sciences
Physics & Astrophysics
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Keele astronomers win international facility time
Keele astronomers have again been very successful in gaining highly competitive access to several international astronomical observatories.
Keele PhD student Jeremy Tregloan-Reed, with John Taylor, pictured left, Pierre Maxted and Alexis Smith, won six nights on the 2.2m telescope at Calar Alto in Southern Spain.
They will measure brightness variations during transit of extrasolar planets in front of their host star, to find out more about these planets such as their temperature, as well as about the occurrence of cool spots on their host star's surface.
Jacco van Loon, with Keele PhD student Mandy Bailey, won four nights on the 3.9m Anglo Australian Telescope in New South Wales, Australia. They will map the distribution of gas present in between stars within the nearby Magellanic Clouds dwarf galaxies and in the foreground Milky Way. The gas reveals itself by absorbing the light of stars at specific frequencies ("colours").
Both awards were made through the OPTICON transnational access programme, which is supported by the European Commission's FP7 Capacities programme. The financial value assigned by STFC to this facility time for the purposes of
RAE/REF metrics, is £128 K.
Jacco, with Keele PhD student Masha Lakicevic, also won 35.5 hours of observing time at the Australia Telescope Compact Array radio interferometre, in New South Wales. They will obtain high-resolution microwave images of the remnant of the supernova that was seen to explode in 1987 in the Large
Magellanic Cloud.
Keele astronomers were also very successful in winning time on space-based facilities: Keele PhD student Adam Patrick, with his supervisor James Reeves, won 270 ks of observing time on the Japanese Suzaku X-ray Observatory. The project involves attempting to measure the spin of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the active galaxy, ESO 511-G030.
Nye Evans, pictured left, was awarded 3.5 hours of Director's Discretionary Time (DDT) on the European Space Agency's Herchel Infrared Observatory, to observe the explosion of the recurrent nova T Pyxidis. He was also awarded 0.2 hours DDT on the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope to observe the same event. In both cases he leads a multinational (UK/USA/European/Indian) collaboration, part of an international campaign to observe this rare event.
The explosion of T Pyxidis is also being observed with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) - the largest single optical telescope in the world, of which Keele is a partner.
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