You will use new data from the Australian SKA Pathfinder survey, GASKAP-HI to help take the temperature of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. PhD & Masters students on this project will have the opportunity to be among the first users of ASKAP.  

We have a variety of projects that will use the new GASKAP-HI data to study the structure and temperature of hydrogen in the Magellanic System. 

The ISM of spiral galaxies is a dynamic environment consisting of thermal gas, relativistic particles, magnetic fields, and dust. The project aims to decipher the origin of filamentary structures in the ISM using numerical simulations as well as observational data.

This project will simulate observations of the rotation measure (RM) at high Galactic latitude that traces the magnetic structures of the Milky Way. The goal is to pinpoint the cause of the recently discovered asymmetry in the RM patterns between the two Galactic hemispheres.

The Physics of Supernovae: Using Observations to understand supernova progenitors, explosion energies, and nucleosynthetic production.

In this project, you will lead development of a key sub system (optical, mechanical, computational) to enable novel ultra-high resolution, visible light instrument Pyxis: a prototype for an astrophysical space interferometer.

Blue stragglers are main-sequence stars that are more luminous and bluer than stars of the same age, and their existence has long defied standard stellar evolution.

The student will analyse Gaia data to recompute orbits of unbound metal-poor stars, exploring their origins and role in the Milky Way’s evolution.

“Fireballs in the sky” is a citizen science app as part of the Desert Fireball Network (DFN). DFN cameras in the Australian desert and the app trac meteors and space junk as it enters the skies.

The project will contribute to the science, development, and engagement aspects of the app.

Students will help commission and operate the Ring Image Next Generation Scintillation Sensor (RINGSS), a newly developed atmospheric turbulence profiling instrument, and analyse the resulting data to produce site statistics.

In this project, the idea would be to combine the publicly available GALAH and APOGEE spectra and analyse them together: We should be able to measure up to 40 different elements from hundreds of lines and provide the community with reference values.

Stellar spectra capture the light of a star across multiple wavelengths and include absorption features of numerous atoms and molecules from a star’s photosphere. The abundance data many stars then allow us to study the chemical evolution across large scales in our Galaxy and decipher Galactic trends.