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Adolescent stars and planets in our neighbourhood from Gaia and FunnelWeb. This project aims to understand how infant stars in their stellar nurseries reach adulthood in the Galactic disk, and link stellar birth to the presence and evolution of adolescent planetary systems. The billion dollar Gaia satellite will change the study of stellar adolescence, with data beginning to flow with an initial public release this year. FunnelWeb – the largest star survey of its kind, covering the entire Southe ....Adolescent stars and planets in our neighbourhood from Gaia and FunnelWeb. This project aims to understand how infant stars in their stellar nurseries reach adulthood in the Galactic disk, and link stellar birth to the presence and evolution of adolescent planetary systems. The billion dollar Gaia satellite will change the study of stellar adolescence, with data beginning to flow with an initial public release this year. FunnelWeb – the largest star survey of its kind, covering the entire Southern sky – will augment this data. This project will combine these datasets, identifying the birthplace of the majority of nearby adolescent stars in the Southern sky and helping to discover and characterise their planetary systems. The results relating to the origin and Galactic context of our solar system are of broad public interest.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE220101325
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$364,092.00
Summary
Minding the gaps in our maps of the stars. This Project seeks to understand the formation of our Galaxy by studying the brightest billion stars. This Project will develop novel methods to account for the unseen hundreds of billions of fainter stars, and for the complexities of space telescopes. Anticipated outcomes include fundamental tests of stellar evolution theory; the discovery of stars flung from our Galaxy by massive black holes; a timeline of our Galaxy’s evolution; and a 3D map of its s ....Minding the gaps in our maps of the stars. This Project seeks to understand the formation of our Galaxy by studying the brightest billion stars. This Project will develop novel methods to account for the unseen hundreds of billions of fainter stars, and for the complexities of space telescopes. Anticipated outcomes include fundamental tests of stellar evolution theory; the discovery of stars flung from our Galaxy by massive black holes; a timeline of our Galaxy’s evolution; and a 3D map of its stars and interstellar dust. This is expected to drive a generational advancement in astrophysics, provide social benefits by engaging the public with discovering the cosmos, and generate economic benefits from a general method for hypothesis testing with biased and incomplete datasets.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE150101323
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$328,000.00
Summary
Disentangling the Complexity of Old Stellar Populations. Galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in modern astronomy. Star clusters are the basic building blocks in the Universe. The oldest stellar aggregates are the globular clusters whose stars show patterns in composition that are not found elsewhere. This project aims to bring new understanding to globular clusters by studying the composition of their constituent stars in many different environments. Patterns in this composition reveal th ....Disentangling the Complexity of Old Stellar Populations. Galaxy formation is an outstanding problem in modern astronomy. Star clusters are the basic building blocks in the Universe. The oldest stellar aggregates are the globular clusters whose stars show patterns in composition that are not found elsewhere. This project aims to bring new understanding to globular clusters by studying the composition of their constituent stars in many different environments. Patterns in this composition reveal the history of star formation and the formation of the globular clusters themselves. These are in turn involved in the formation of galaxies. The project aims to use these stars to probe the formation of globular clusters and the stellar components of the Galaxy, and hence link these old stars to larger cosmological questions.Read moreRead less
Using the sounds of stars to reveal the Milky Way's evolution. This project aims to use a completely new approach to investigate how our Galaxy formed and evolved, by merging two fields within astrophysics – galactic archaeology and the study of stellar oscillations. This will dramatically improve understandings of the fundamental physics that governs the evolution of all cool stars, such as the Sun. This project aims to go beyond classical astronomy, which examines only the surface of stars. Fo ....Using the sounds of stars to reveal the Milky Way's evolution. This project aims to use a completely new approach to investigate how our Galaxy formed and evolved, by merging two fields within astrophysics – galactic archaeology and the study of stellar oscillations. This will dramatically improve understandings of the fundamental physics that governs the evolution of all cool stars, such as the Sun. This project aims to go beyond classical astronomy, which examines only the surface of stars. For the first time, the interior structure of thousands of stars across the Galaxy will be probed to reveal intricate details of its evolution from the imprint of each star's oscillations. This will be possible through access to data of extremely high precision from one European and two National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space telescopes.Read moreRead less
Revealing the history of the Milky Way Galaxy through precision stellar spectroscopy. How did the Milky Way Galaxy form? The answer to this fundamental question lies in the chemical compositions of stars. Enormous investments by the Australian and international community into state-of-the-art facilities and surveys will yield a 1 million star sample for chemical analysis. To fully harvest the information from those surveys requires stellar chemical composition measurements of the highest possibl ....Revealing the history of the Milky Way Galaxy through precision stellar spectroscopy. How did the Milky Way Galaxy form? The answer to this fundamental question lies in the chemical compositions of stars. Enormous investments by the Australian and international community into state-of-the-art facilities and surveys will yield a 1 million star sample for chemical analysis. To fully harvest the information from those surveys requires stellar chemical composition measurements of the highest possible precision. This project aims to use recently pioneered analysis techniques that have led the field of chemical abundance measurements in stars to the unprecedented precision level of 2 per cent (a five-fold improvement) to chart the evolution of our Galaxy over cosmic time.Read moreRead less
A golden age of stellar astrophysics with Kepler. The project will use observations from NASA's Kepler space telescope to study oscillations in the stars via careful analysis of changes in their brightness. The observations will reveal the properties of the stars and their planets in unprecedented detail.
Dynamic stars: atmospheres, evolution and asteroseismology. By developing state-of-the-art stellar atmosphere and evolution models, the project will endeavour to answer some of the key outstanding questions in stellar astrophysics including how magnetic fields are manifested in stars, how stars are affected by convection, how oscillations are excited in stars and how old the most ancient stars in the Milky Way are. The project will endeavour to make obsolete the free parameters that have hampere ....Dynamic stars: atmospheres, evolution and asteroseismology. By developing state-of-the-art stellar atmosphere and evolution models, the project will endeavour to answer some of the key outstanding questions in stellar astrophysics including how magnetic fields are manifested in stars, how stars are affected by convection, how oscillations are excited in stars and how old the most ancient stars in the Milky Way are. The project will endeavour to make obsolete the free parameters that have hampered stellar modelling for the past half-century. Using unique stellar models the project aims to provide rich legacy resources for countless studies in modern astronomy and provide the necessary theoretical underpinning for ambitious Australian-led Milky Way surveys, such as GALAH and SkyMapper, and international satellite missions such as Kepler, TESS and PLATO.Read moreRead less
Galactic archaeology — fossil evidence of how our Galaxy's disk formed. The vast stellar content of our Galaxy contains the fossil imprints of how it was formed. The current model for galaxy formation, the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm, is that they have built up over billions of years by the merging of smaller systems, but cosmological simulations fail to reproduce the key properties of individual galaxies. The predicted high level of merger activity makes it very difficult to form galaxies l ....Galactic archaeology — fossil evidence of how our Galaxy's disk formed. The vast stellar content of our Galaxy contains the fossil imprints of how it was formed. The current model for galaxy formation, the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm, is that they have built up over billions of years by the merging of smaller systems, but cosmological simulations fail to reproduce the key properties of individual galaxies. The predicted high level of merger activity makes it very difficult to form galaxies like our own. This is the key stumbling block to progress at the present time. The project aims to assess observationally how important mergers have been in the formation of the Galaxy, the critical test of CDM. The project will target the stars in the Galactic disk and bulge with the HERMES wide-field spectrograph.Read moreRead less
Australian Laureate Fellowships - Grant ID: FL110100012
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$2,594,354.00
Summary
Unravelling the history of the Milky Way Galaxy and searching for exoplanets through the chemical compositions of stars. Understanding the past and future of the Milky Way Galaxy and how planets form around stars are two of the main challenges facing astronomy today. This project will make crucial inroads to both of these topics through a combination of sophisticated supercomputer simulations and unprecedented observations with world-leading Australian facilities.