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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
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
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
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.
Galactic Archaeology: a new probe of the cold dark matter paradigm. The project capitalises on Australia's technological leadership in carrying out wide-field surveys, and on Australia's intellectual leadership in stellar astronomy and galactic archaeology. HERMES is the new Anglo-Australian Telescope instrument that will keep Australians competitive in a field that is set to explode in the coming decade.
Dark matter in spiral galaxies: the mass of their stellar disks. Spiral galaxies are immersed in vast halos of dark matter which make up more than 90% of their mass. The densities of the dark halos reflect the density of the expanding universe at the time when the halos condensed. The gravitational field of spirals and the density of the halos are measured from their rotation curves. For this analysis, the mass of their visible disks must be known, but it has not been possible to measure disk ma ....Dark matter in spiral galaxies: the mass of their stellar disks. Spiral galaxies are immersed in vast halos of dark matter which make up more than 90% of their mass. The densities of the dark halos reflect the density of the expanding universe at the time when the halos condensed. The gravitational field of spirals and the density of the halos are measured from their rotation curves. For this analysis, the mass of their visible disks must be known, but it has not been possible to measure disk masses reliably until now. This project aims to exploit new instruments and improved analysis techniques to measure disk masses and halo densities accurately for the first time, and then to answer a central question of cosmology: when did galaxies of different masses form from the ancient expanding universe?Read moreRead less