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Postgraduate research project

Understanding type Ia supernovae using the Rubin Observatory

Funding
Competition funded View fees and funding
Type of degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Entry requirements
2:1 honours degree View full entry requirements
Faculty graduate school
Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences
Closing date

About the project

Supernovae are cosmic explosions that have a dramatic influence across astrophysics, from galaxy formation, to stellar evolution, to cosmology. The thermonuclear ‘type Ia’ supernovae provide astronomer’s with their best extragalactic ‘standard candle’, and are precise tools to study dark energy and the expansion rate of the universe. The next five years will see a revolution in the field of the number of supernovae discovered will rise from the hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands per year.

Southampton has a leading role in two major new facilities that will drive this. These are the Vera C. Rubin Observatory conducting the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and the 4MOST multi-object spectrograph, which will study thousands of supernovae spectroscopically as part of its TIme Domain Extragalactic Survey (TIDES). You will join the Rubin Observatory’s Dark Energy Science Collaboration and use access to proprietary Rubin simulations and astrophysical knowledge of supernovae, to prepare for the science exploitation of the first data from these new facilities. This will involve developing new techniques to analyse large samples of supernova events. The project will then analyse the first data, focusing on the first few thousand type Ia supernovae. They will generate separate cosmological analyses (‘Hubble diagrams’) as a function of astrophysical variables, investigating the dependence of supernova distances on host galaxy stellar mass, star-formation rate and dust, as well as the supernova colour and other astrophysical systematics. The result will be an improved understanding of type Ia supernovae that will underpin the next generation of cosmological measurements

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