RESEARCH STUDENTSHIP
OR BURSARY
Research studentships are offered to students wishing to undertake a PhD programme. All
studentships are highly competitive and you should ensure (and demonstrate) that there is a good
match between your own qualifications and interests and those being sought for the particular
studentship.
Research Centre where
studentship will be held
Astrophysics, Faculty of Natural Sciences
Studentship reference
Web link to any further
information (e.g. Research
Institute)
Research topic or field title
Research topic or field –
full description (or attach
document)
Available from (date)
FNS GS 2015-09
Faculty Research Office - http://www.keele.ac.uk/fnsro/
Funding support available
– Fees, stipend, duration
Funding support is provided as follows;
100% UK/EU tuition fees for 3 years commencing Academic year
2016/2017. Stipend support for three years at Research Council
rates (2015/6 £14,057 per annum).
Jointly supported by STFC and the Faculty of Natural Sciences,
Keele University.
UK residents are eligible for full funding (tuition fees and stipend at
Research Council rate). EU nationals (who are not resident in the
UK) will normally qualify for a fees-only award.
Source of funding
Eligibility criteria
Terms and conditions of
studentship
Number of studentships
available
Application details
Closing date for
applications
Contact for further
information and to whom
applications will be sent
A choice of Astrophysics projects is available (see below) of which
two will be funded
see below.
September 2016.
See the University Code of Practice
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go to http://www.keele.ac.uk/pgresearch/studentships/ and click on
the "Apply online here" button in this studentship.
26th February 2016 in the first instance. Applications received by
the deadline will receive first consideration, applications received
after the deadline will be considered until the positions are filled.
Contact Ann Billington(PGR Administrator) for further information
(a.billington@keele.ac.uk)
Informal enquiries about the projects should be made to the Project
Coordinator, Dr Raphael Hirschi (r.hirschi@keele.ac.uk).
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Candidate profile

Qualifications,
Experience and
Skills
Attitude and
Personality




Essential
Candidates must hold at least an upper-2nd
class Bachelors degree or an appropriate
Masters qualification in a physics related
subject or its equivalent.
Ability and willingness to undertake
advanced research study at PhD level
Excellent communication, interpersonal
and organizational skills
Willingness to learn new theoretical and
practical science skills and commitment to
ongoing personal training
Ability to work both independently and as
part of a team




Desirable
First class Bachelor or 2:1
Masters degree in a
relevant discipline
Evidence of ability to
undertake research work
in the area of astrophysics
or related area
Evidence of organizational
and time management
skills
Skills in planning research
work
Project descriptions
Please note that funding for two of these projects is available; please identify your preferred
project(s) in your on-line application
Transiting extra-solar planets with WASP-South (Prof Coel Hellier, Dr John Southworth and
Dr Pierre Maxted)
Project Description: Keele University operates the WASP-South observatory in South Africa, as
part of the award-winning Wide-Angle Search for Planets (WASP) project. The WASP-South
instrument is the leading transit-survey in the Southern hemisphere, and has found the brightest
transiting exoplanets in the Southern skies. Such systems are the best probes we have of the
nature and evolution of planets.
There is an opportunity to join in the discovery of transiting exoplanets, to lead follow-up studies of
exoplanets using ground-based observatories such as ESO's 3.6-m/HARPS and the VLT, and
satellites such as Kepler/K2, and to contribute to the improvement and development of the WASPSouth observatory as we push WASP-South towards the discovery of smaller planets, and as we
prepare for the era of the TESS mission.
Star formation in the Magellanic Clouds (Dr Joana Oliveira)
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the nearest templates for the detailed study of star
formation under metal-poor conditions. These galaxies mirror the conditions typical of galaxies
during the early phases of their assembly, providing a stepping stone to understand star formation
at high redshift where such processes can not be directly observed. Furthermore, they provide the
exciting new opportunity of bridging the gap between star formation processes on large galacticwide scales and on the small scales of individual young stellar objects.
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Dr. Joana Oliveira is an expert on star formation studies in these galaxies. Her research lends itself
to observational PhD projects addressing different facets of the star formation process, for instance
the study of the detailed chemistry of gas, dust and ice in the environments of young massive stars
in the Clouds, or using galaxy-wide photometric surveys to constrain the Initial mass function and
star formation rates across the whole system in order to link the environmental conditions to the
star formation outcomes. A PhD student would have the opportunity to work with data from state of
the art facilities like the Herschel
and Spitzer Space Telescopes, ESO/VLT, VISTA etc.
Young stars and stellar moving groups in the Gaia-ESO survey (Prof Rob Jeffries, Dr Nick
Wright)
The Gaia-ESO survey (GES) is a massive spectroscopic survey taking place at the VLT in Chile. It
is obtaining some 100,000 stellar spectra of representative samples of all populations in the Milky
Way, from star forming regions to halo stars, with the over-arching goal of understanding the
"chemo-dynamical" properties of our Galaxy.
The aim of this project is to use data from the GES to investigate the properties of young, nearby
stars that are members of spatially dispersed, yet kinematically coherent, "moving groups".
Members of these moving groups have assumed the premier role in understanding the early
evolution of stars and their planetary systems, yet their origins are poorly understood.
The GES data will be used to select samples of very young stars and then examine their chemical
"DNA" to establish to what extent they are chemically as well as kinematically coherent. The
significance of chemical coherency will be tested by using the GES observations of many young,
coeval clusters and star forming regions, The student will develop techniques to find young stars,
design methods to test their chemical coherence and use the first release of data from the Gaia
astrometric satellite to carefully examine their kinematics and estimate their ages. There will be a
strong emphasis on team-working with a large European consortium of collaborators. The objective
will be to understand whether moving group members originated in coeval clusters that have
disintegrated in the Galaxy's tidal field, or whether their kinematics have been collimated by other
dynamical processes.
Stellar Hydrodynamics, Evolution and Nucleosynthesis (Dr R Hirschi)
Dr Hirschi was awarded a European Research Council starting grant, that funds a 5-year multidisciplinary project entitled SHYNE (Stellar HYdrodynamics, Nucleosynthesis and Evolution). The
grant started in November 2012 and enabled Dr Hirschi to build a team of two post-doctoral
researchers and two PhD students, and to acquire a dedicated 1000-CPU computer cluster. This
provides an ideal environment for theoretical computational projects. The SHYNE team
collaborates with the Norwegian company Numascale, adding an inter-sectoral component to the
project. More details on the SHYNE project are given here: http://www.astro.keele.ac.uk/shyne/ .
Possible PhD topics range from large-scale 3-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamics simulations of
convection and rotation to using stellar evolution models as virtual nuclear physics laboratories.
Projects will also involve using (1D) stellar evolution models to explain the results of current large
observational surveys of stars and explosive transients. The successful candidate will join this
research effort at the boundary between hydrodynamics, astro- and nuclear physics. She/he will
also learn key computing skills and be exposed to the industry, which will give her/him a strong
skills set for both an academic and an industrial career.
Atmospheric properties of A, F and G stars (Dr Barry Smalley)
Stellar physics is now entering a new, high-precision era with many ESO, ESA and other
international projects. The data obtained with two successful satellites, CoRoT and Kepler, and
from ground-based project such as SuperWASP, allow the analysis of pulsations of thousands of
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stars, in synergy with exoplanet research. Asteroseismology can now provide the accurate
measurements of masses, radii and ages of stars that are required for the study of habitable
exoplanets. Spectroscopy is one of the most powerful tools at an astronomer’s disposal, allowing
the determination of the fundamental parameters of stars: surface temperature, gravity, chemical
composition, magnetic field, rotation and turbulence. This project will study the properties of newly
identified pulsating stars and the interaction between these pulsations and other physical
processes occurring within the stellar atmosphere.
High-precision studies of eclipsing binary stars observed using space telescopes (Dr John
Taylor (Southworth))
The study of eclipsing binary star systems is one of the most mature and rewarding areas of stellar
physics, offering the unique opportunity to determine the masses and radii of distant stars directly
from observational data. This area of research is currently experiencing a renaissance, due to the
remarkable quality and quantity of data coming from space-based searches for extrasolar planets.
Major contributors to this new era are the recent Kepler and CoRoT telescopes, the ongoing K2
and BRITE missions, and the forthcoming space satellites TESS and PLATO. The successful
candidate will study eclipsing binary star systems which have been observed with the Kepler
telescope, and/or are currently being observed by the K2 mission. Follow-up spectroscopic
observations have already been obtained for some of these objects and opportunities exist to visit
large telescopes to obtain spectroscopic observations of others. The fundamental aim of this
project is to check the predictions of theoretical models of stars, which form the foundation of most
areas of observational and theoretical astrophysics.
The Dynamical Evolution of Massive Star Forming Regions (Dr Nick Wright, Prof Rob
Jeffries)
Most stars, including the Sun, are born in clusters ranging in size from 100 to 1 million members.
These clustered environments may be of the utmost importance in the early lives of stars and their
circumstellar material - close stellar encounters in high density regions can shape planetary
systems, whilst the ionising radiation from nearby, high mass stars can photoevaporate discs and
drive gas from the star forming region. Most clusters do not survive longer than 10 million years,
but the reasons for this are poorly understood - are they born in an unbound state, or does
expulsion of residual gas lead to their disruption?
In this project the student will use exquisitely accurate tangential velocities derived from long timeseries of cluster images to examine the dynamics of high-mass star forming regions - large clusters
containing more than 10,000 stars. These studies will be complemented by spectroscopy from
massive spectroscopic surveys such as the Gaia-ESO survey at the VLT and new data from
WEAVE at the William Herschel Telescope, in order to identify cluster members, and will take
advantage of the first releases of data from the European Gaia astrometric satellite. The aim of the
project will be to obtain diagnostics of how these clusters formed, their present dynamical state and
their future evolution. These diagnostics will be compared with state-of-the art N-body numerical
models. An important part of the project will be to perform detailed simulations of how the
sensitivity and biases inherent in real, imperfect observations affect the comparison with these
models and to design new diagnostics that are largely immune to such biases. Such diagnostics
and techniques will be widely applicable to many other projects using the Gaia data.
Galaxy populations behind the Magellanic Clouds (Dr Jacco van Loon)
The VISTA Magellanic Clouds survey (VMC) is near its completion of the by far - deepest and most
detailed near-infrared mapping of the nearby Magellanic Clouds galaxies, the region in between
them, and several flanking fields. This provides a fantastic opportunity for an unbiased near4
infrared based selection of background galaxies. Preliminary work has already uncovered galaxies
at redshifts between < 0.1 and > 4, some with active nuclei and some with strong absorption line
systems arising in foreground gas-rich objects. Combination with equally superb mid- and farinfrared maps from the SAGE and HERITAGE projects, radio continuum surveys, and X-ray
observations offer a wealth of data to characterise the galaxies and identify both trends and
outliers. (An example of the latter was our discovery of a modest-mass early-type galaxy hosting an
oversized black hole.) While ample data are available for galaxy population and clustering analysis
and the creation of a catalogue and atlas, these will also yield various types of targets for follow-up
observations (spectroscopic and Hubble Space Telescope and/or James Webb Space Telescope
high-resolution images) in which the student will take a leading role.
Dusty dying stars in galaxies in the Local Universe (Dr Jacco van Loon)
When intermediate-mass stars and most massive stars enter the final phases of their lives, they
become red giants (AGB stars) or red supergiants. This phase is characterised by strong mass
loss, with important consequences for the circumstances of their death (planetary nebula or
supernova), accompanied by the production of dust grains. Thus, these stars are important drivers
of galaxy evolution. They can be studied individually in nearby galaxies, out to several Mpc.
Building on our pioneering, comprehensive work in the Local Group spiral galaxy M33 we are now
expanding this programme to galaxies outside the Local Group, to include the grand-design spiral
galaxy M101 and other galaxies such as NGC300 (an M33 analogue but with a different history).
The goals are manifold: applying stellar evolution theory to convert observed populations of dusty
evolved stars into star formation histories, and using the observations to constrain stellar evolution
theory and to derive better prescriptions of mass loss and dust production. The project involves
existing data as well as the pursuit of new observations, and the use of existing theoretical models.
Laboratory astrophysics at the Diamond Light Source (Prof. A. Evans, Keele, and Dr S.
Thompson, Diamond Light Source)
The Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron radiation facility, located at the Harwell
Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. It produces intense beams of X-rays which can be
used to study the structure of solid materials. This project will use X-ray diffraction and other
techniques at Diamond to study the structure and evolution of cosmic dust analogues, as they are
processed and exposed to conditions that simulate those found in the early Solar System, and in
planetary, proto-planetary and circum-stellar environments. In particular the project will exploit the
new "Long Duration Experiment" facility that is available on the powder diffraction beam-line I11;
this facility is unique, world-leading, and gets closer to replicating cosmic environments than has
hitherto been possible. The project will also provide ample opportunities for training in a wide
variety of laboratory skills.
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