Cosmological Radio Transients: Novel Techniques and Optical Counterparts
- Prof Rob Fender (http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/
Two PhD positions are available to work in the newly-formed '4 PI SKY' team at Southampton, led by Professor Fender and funded by a 3 million Euro EC grant. The goal of the team is to coordinate and advance global efforts for the discovery, identification and understanding of cosmological radio bursts. These bursts are associated with diverse extreme astrophysical phenomena such as merging neutron stars, accreting black holes and supernovae. With these programs we hope to perform a real-time census of particle acceleration in the local universe, understand the growth of black holes on cosmological timescales, probe the nature of the distant intergalactic medium for the first time, and - just maybe - detect electromagnetic counterparts to the first-detected gravitational wave sources.
Professor Fender is joint project leader of radio transients programs on both LOFAR (www.lofar.org) and MeerKAT (www.ska.ac.za), two revolutionary new radio telescopes. The PhD projects available are (i) to work, in partnership with the Oxford University Transient Universe Studies group (OTUS), to develop novel techniques for the detection of transient events in the vast streams of data that will be produced by telescopes such as LOFAR and MeerKAT, and (ii) to work on the follow-up and classification programs for the optical counterparts of detected radio transients - only with these data will we be able to understand the physics behind the bursts that we detect.
Both of these projects will involve close collaboration with, and visits to, other collaborating groups in places such as Amsterdam, Cape Town and Sydney. The projects are funded for 4 years each and are open to applicants from across the EC.
For more details on the group, and how to apply for the studentships,
please go to:
http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/
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