Astronomy: Galaxies
Galaxies are large assemblies of stars, ranging in size from tiny dwarf galaxies, containing only a few thousand stars, to the giant ellipticals found at the centres of clusters, which contain a thousand billion stars. Our galaxy, which we see from within as the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy, one of the two largest galaxies in the Local Group, a small group of approximately 50 nearby galaxies. When you look out into space with the world's biggest telescopes you can see a Universe full of other galaxies all at various stages of their lives. The goal of our research group is to understand the properties of these galaxies, to discover how they were formed in the first place, and how they have changed over history.
To help us achieve our objectives we lead and participate in major international research projects. Currently a large part of our research is exploiting the observations that are being made by the Herschel Space Telescope. Steve Eales is principle investigator of both the ATLAS and HRS projects. ATLAS is the largest Herschel Open Time Key project and is designed to provide an extra-galactic survey of large areas of sky. The HRS is an in depth survey of about 300 nearby galaxies. Jonathan Davies is principle investigator of the HeViCS project. This is a large Open Time project to survey the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. The whole research group is involved in these projects and additionally in the other Herschel surveys VNGS and HERMES. The VNGS is a survey of the nearest brightest galaxies in the sky while HERMES considers the faintest most distant sources. In addition we are actively involved with the BLAST project and Jonathan Davies is also the principle investigator of AGES. BLAST is a balloon bourn experiment to observe at far-infrared wavelengths and AGES is a survey for atomic hydrogen in the Universe.
As well as extra-galactic studies we are also interested in the origin of the dust that gives rise to the far-infrared emission. We participate in MESS which is a Herschel survey to look at dust production in evolved stars.