Astronomy Research Group
The Group is a member of the UK SALT Consortium, which owns a 5% share in the 10m Southern African Large Telescope, a partner in the superWASP consortium which operates two robotic sky-patrol camera systems (one in La Palma, one at Sutherland Observatory), and the UK LoFAR Consortium. Group members on the science teams for the 2009 ESA GENIE and the 2015 DARWIN missions, and are members of the guaranteed time consortia of the 2006 Japanese Astro-F infrared survey mission and the 2009 Herschel SPIRE instrument. We also coordinate an EU Research Training Network in Astrobiology.
The Physics and Astronomy Department is equipped with an excellent range of high-specification clustered Linux machines (comprising over 100 processors, all of gigahertz speed or higher, and several terabytes of backed-up storage), a complement of PCs running windows, and a few legacy Compaq Alphas. These are maintained by a dedicated computer manager who is part funded by our STFC rolling grant. All postgraduate students have a personal desk-top machine and are able to run IRAF, IDL, STARLINK, AIPS and other software packages
