Research Supervisor Connect
Since mid 2022, the JWST has revealed that galaxies have developed mature discs at high redshift (z > 1), much earlier than expected. Discs are delicate structures and were thought to evolve carefully and slowly over billions of years of cosmic time. The early Universe was a violent ecosystem and not an easy place to make delicate discs. Working with our group, you will build supercomputer models that try to reveal how discs emerge in the presence of rapid infall of merging dark matter and gas. These observations are compared directly with the latest JWST results as they come in.
Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn.
The James Webb Space Telescope is revolutionizing our view of how galaxies are born and evolve. It seems that the disc component (e.g. Milky Way disc) gets going long before we originally thought, along with very intense star formation and black hole activity at the centre. Our group is at the forefront of producing turbulent disc models driven by star formation and black hole (active nucleus) activity. We seek to understand how thin discs form when there is so much turbulent activity around in the early universe. This project will teach you how to run supercomputer simulations and to compare the results with new JWST images, a very hot topic. We are one of the most productive groups in the University and always publish the results of projects with students. This project will require the student to write some python scripts and to understand some basic and advanced processes in Galactic star formation, black hole activity and dynamics.
See the many papers published by Bland-Hawthorn, ranked the top physicist in Australia by Research.com (2022): https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1Rw_qy4AAAAJ&hl=en
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 3191