ProfessorJonathan Hawthorn

Project Opportunities

Title: Smart Photonic Systems for Extremely Large Telescopes

Summary of opportunity:

Astrophotonics: work in a team that is developing cutting edge technologies for the new generation of extremely large telescopes.

Opportunity synopsis:

The basic project is to be involved in the integration and testing of a new concept astronomical instrument. This instrument will be tested “on sky” at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) before being shipped off to an overseas location. It is expected that the student will be directly involved in the lab and AAT testing. The new astrophotonics labs are in the basement of the Physics Building. We are developing special fibres that suppress a large number of unwanted lines from the earth’s atmosphere. These fibres involve taper transitions (photonic lanterns) and parallel arrays of fibre Bragg gratings. We will assemble an optical test bench to focus light into these gratings. The light will be fed to an optical spectrum analyzer. We will test the stability of the equipment to stress, temperature and humidity. We will use different classes of light sources to establish the consistency and performance of the gratings. We will look at different ways of packaging the gratings for ease of transport. There are several other new photonic devices that we can test if time allows. These include a photonic spectrograph and an “imaging fibre” bundle, called a hexabundle.

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Project Opportunities

Title: Does the Universe have vortex motions?

Summary of opportunity:

The project is to carry out computer simulations for a new instrument concept – hexabundles - that will see “first light” in 2010 on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. These devices allow us to obtain imaging spectral data for many galaxies at once and are set to revolutionize the way we carry out cosmology surveys.

Opportunity synopsis:

Most wide-field cosmology surveys today make use of optical fibres to obtain spectra of many galaxies at a single telescope pointing. In this way, one can build up redshift surveys of up to a million galaxies. The new hexabundles will replace these fibres so that each galaxy can be imaged at 400 distinct locations at once, and many galaxies simultaneously at that. This is a huge breakthrough in how we think about surveys because now we can obtain maps of how the stars and gas are moving together, the distribution of their chemical elements and so on. And we can do this for tens or even hundreds of thousands of galaxies across the sky.

We are now carrying out detailed numerical simulations of how the universe unfolded to see if we can detect primordial tidal fields, universal rotation, various predictions of Bianchi universes, and so forth. Some of the simulations we need already exist on the web, but depending on the project we decide upon, we may need to run some new ones with the national facility at Swinburne.

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Project Opportunities

Title: Deconstructing the Galaxy - in search of giant waves

Summary of opportunity:

For the first time, we are able to probe the Milky Way in 6 dimensions - i.e. 3D spatial position, 3D kinematic motion - for millions, even billions of stars.  We can slice the Galaxy in many new ways and explore how it is evolving over cosmic time.  We can do that with data and with supercomputer simulations.

The supervisory team for this project also includes Dr Thorsten Tepper-Garcia and Dr Sanjib Sharma.
A complimentary scholarship for this project is available.  To find out more, refer to The Hunstead Merit Award for Astrophysics.

Opportunity synopsis:

The ESA Gaia satellite has obtained accurate positional and velocity information on 1.6 billion stars in the Milky Way.  These data are providing amazing information on how the Galaxy works.  In a new discovery, we ind that the Galactic disc has been badly damaged by a passing dwarf galaxy causing the disc to ring like a bell.  The dwarf is driving giant waves across the disc that we can easily see in the Gaia data.  We have produced advanced models of this interaction with a view to understand something new about forced oscillations and the nature of dark matter.  We are one of the most productive groups in the University and typically 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 galactic dynamics.

Project Opportunities

Title: Young galaxies observed with the James Webb Space Telescope

Summary of opportunity:

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. 

Opportunity synopsis:

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.