ProfessorPeter Tuthill

The core research themes being explored in my group lie in astronomical imaging, interferometry, photonics and advanced astronomical instrumentation. These technologies are giving humanity its first ever window into the intimate lives of stars: how they are born and how they die. The physics associated with phenomena in the very immediate circumstellar environoment of stars, right down to the stellar surface itself, has been imaged in exquisite detail with our experiments, revealing dramatic plumes, wakes, shocks, flows and disks. These are of profound significance in understanding the life cycle of stars, for the winds and flows from the last generation of dying stars seeds the galaxy with heavy elements such as Carbon, Nitrogen and Oxygen: an enrichment process of critical importance to forming future stellar systems and perhaps most exciting of all, their families of circling planets. Such exoplanets are now known to be ubiquitious throughout the Galaxy, however capturing an image of the faint mote of light betraying a planet next to the overwhelming glare of its host star is the most audacious of the research themes being pursured within my group. Our masking interferometry technique, now implemented at almost all of the world's largest telescopes, has proved to be the most successful in its domain delviering a handful of spectacular detections of planets at the epoch of formation. Our group now has active projects at premier world observatories (Subaru, Keck, VLT, LBT) to further advance the sophistication of these interferometric technologies, so that we move from an era of exoplanetary detection
to one of exploration and characterisation, probing for chemistry and biosignatures in planetary atmospheres.

Peter's research aligns with the Faculty of Science Research Strengths - Understanding the Universe, Climate and Environmental Change, Data and Decisions, Earth and Space Exploration and Technologies.