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Home > Farnsworth [stg] > CIRA > Our Research > Science Program

Science Program

Our staff work across four primary science themes, as outlined.  These themes tie in directly to SKAO science drivers and working groups, with our staff and students possessing the necessary observational, theoretical and computational expertise to enable high-impact results in these fields.

Lead: Professor James Miller-Jones

Accretion Physics and Slow Transients

Short-lived explosive events such as the outbursts caused by a black hole feeding on an orbiting companion star, the tidal destruction of a star by a supermassive black hole, or the cataclysmic death of a massive star, provide excellent laboratories for studying high-energy astrophysics. Such events allow us to probe energies, magnetic fields, and strong gravity that can never be reproduced here on Earth, and provide insights into how black holes form and grow. Our researchers use data from radio telescopes to characterise the powerful jets and outflows produced in these extreme environments, determining how they are launched and how they feed back energy to their surroundings. This work benefits from supporting observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the new windows into these cosmic cataclysms provided by multi-messenger astronomy, using gravitational waves, neutrinos, and high-energy gamma-rays. We also use the techniques developed for the study of transient astrophysical events to develop the Murchison Widefield Array’s capabilities for detecting and tracking objects in low-Earth orbit.

Lead: Professor Cathryn Trott

Epoch of Reionisation

The Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) project aims to untangle the evolution of the Universe during its first billion years. This will be achieved through observations of the redshifted hydrogen line signal, emitted by the neutral hydrogen gas that was present in abundance during this epoch. Structural features of the formation of the first ionising sources during the EoR are traced by the neutral hydrogen gas signal. The spatial and temperature distribution of the hydrogen line observations allows us to probe this evolution, and explore the growth of structure during the cosmic dawn. Radio telescopes such as the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and SKA-Low telescope, under construction in Western Australia, will play a key role in detecting this hydrogen line signal and understanding the mysteries of the early Universe.

Find out more about EoR Find out more at Astro3D
Lead: Associate Professor Natasha Hurley-Walker

Extragalactic Radio Astronomy

Our researchers use the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Western Australia to explore the radio universe, both near and far. In our GLEAM and GLEAM-X survey, we map vast structures like giant radio galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the cosmic web. We’ve also found unusual objects closer to home, like slowly repeating radio sources that could be a new type of star with an incredibly strong magnetic field, called magnetars. Using the MWA, we can study the solar wind by observing how it makes distant radio signals “twinkle.” This allows us to explore space weather to see how the solar wind propagates through our Solar System.

Lead: Dr Ramesh Bhat

Pulsars and Fast Transients

Pulsars are like cosmic lighthouses that emanate intense beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. These fascinating objects enable us to explore the fundamentals of physics, and they are proven versatile tools for probing physics from nuclear to cosmological scales. We have developed the capability for the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) to study radio sources at time resolutions down to a millionth of a second, and are using this to study pulsars. Currently, a major focus is conducting an MWA survey of the entire southern sky to detect new pulsars and study known systems, aiming to better understand how these exotic objects produce radio emission, and how they can be utilized to explore new vistas in physics and astrophysics. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are recently uncovered astrophysical phenomena; they are like cosmic fireworks – brief, yet incredibly powerful explosions that outshine almost everything else in the Universe. Their emissions are generated by matter under extreme conditions, whose properties probe physical regimes that far transcend the range achievable in terrestrial experiments, giving us a unique glimpse into the laws of physics. They make powerful probes to explore the Universe at sub-millisecond time resolution, and by studying how different radio frequencies within a burst are slowed down as they travel through the tenuous gas between galaxies, we can determine the density of that gas, which allows us to weigh the Universe, and perform key cosmological measurements.

Find out about the CRAFT Survey