Abstract: TBA

Garry Foran's 18-month review

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

PhD 30-month (pre-submission) review. Note later time than usual.

Abstract: TBA

Following the signing of the Strategic Partnership agreement between the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Australian government on 11 July 2017, Australian-based astronomers will be eligible to apply for observing time on the facilities of the La Silla Paranal Observatories in Chile commencing with Period 101 (1 April - 30 Sep 2018). The Call for Proposals will be issued at the end of August, and the proposal deadline will be Thursday 28 September 2017.

In the lead up to this proposal round the AAO's International Telescopes Support Office (ITSO) is coordinating a series of "ESO Community Days" around Australia, on behalf of ESO, the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, and Astronomy Australia Ltd. The ESO Director for Science Dr Rob Ivison, and the Head of the Observing Programs Office at ESO Dr Ferdinando Patat, will provide a comprehensive overview of the current and future observing facilities available, as well as the proposal preparation, submission, and assessment process. The sessions will run from 10am until lunchtime as follows:

Monday 18 Sep 2017: AAO, Sydney

Tuesday 19 Sep 2017: RSAA Mt Stromlo, Canberra

Wednesday 20 Sep 2017: Swinburne University, Melbourne

Thursday 21 Sep 2017: University of Western Australia, Perth

Friday 22 Sep 2017: University of Queensland, Brisbane

Further details on venues will be provided closer to the date. Attendance is free and pre-registration will not be required. For those unable to attend any of these events in person, the AAO-based session will include an option for video-conference participation, and a recording will be made available.

The ITSO web site has been expanded to include some supplementary information about ESO, and links to the relevant sections of the ESO web site. Potential applicants are encouraged to register for an ESO User Portal account, which will also place you on the mailing list to receive ESO Science Announcements and Newsletters.

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Abstract: TBA

In preparation for the 2020 Decadal Survey, NASA has formed four Science and Technology Definition Teams (STDTs) to create large mission concept studies for the next generation of large class missions. One of these mission concepts is LUVOIR: The Large Ultraviolet Optical InfraRed surveyor. LUVOIR is exploring two architectures, with primary apertures at 15.1 and 9.2 meters in size. LUVOIR will cover a similar range of wavelengths to HST, but with factors of tens to thousands increase in throughput. In this talk, I will describe the telescope concept, the instruments, and candidate science programs. I will leave ample time for discussion on other science programs, including a demonstration of our exposure time calculators with the goal of soliciting science program ideas from scientists at Swinburne.

ZFOURGE and ZFIRE are sensitive extragalactic surveys that track how galaxies assemble over the past 12 billion years. ZFOURGE identifies and measures cosmological distances to approximately 70,000 objects using a custom set of near-infrared imaging filters. ZFIRE selects galaxies from ZFOURGE for spectroscopic follow-up to measure how baryons cycle between stars, winds, and the Inter-Stellar Medium (ISM). Here I highlight results that include mapping how galaxies are distributed in the distant universe, characterising the galaxies' spectral properties over cosmic time, and determining how galaxies differ depending on their neighbours.

The Halo Occupation Distribution (HOD) framework is a powerful approach for interpreting galaxy clustering measurements and constraining the galaxy-halo connection, as highlighted by analyses of the SDSS. We present new results for the redshift evolution of the galaxy content of halos as predicted by semi-analytic galaxy formation models. We further examine how the halo occupation functions vary with large-scale environment and halo formation time. This provides physical insight into the nature of galaxy assembly bias, and sets the foundation for extending the HOD approach and for creating realistic mock catalogs for upcoming surveys.

Aside from being spectacular displays in their own right, Type Ia supernova explosions have a key role in measuring the expansion history of the Universe and synthesizing the iron group elements. But what is their origin? That Type Ia supernovae arise from exploding white dwarfs is relatively well-established but the manner in which the explosion is ignited and how this can be determined from what we observe remain hotly debated issues.
I will discuss the theoretical modelling of Type Ia supernovae with particular focus on how radiative transfer simulations can be used to test explosion scenarios. I will argue that understanding the diversity of thermonuclear supernovae requires us to investigate a variety of different progenitor scenarios. Specifically, I will present recent results from our work on both Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf explosion scenarios and sub-Chandrasekhar mass models.

Hubble has revolutionized the discovery and study of very distant galaxies through its deep imaging surveys. Together the HST WFC3/IR and ACS cameras have opened up the exploration of the universe in the first billion years after the Big Bang. I will discuss what we have learned about the earliest galaxies during the reionization epoch at z>6 from the remarkable HST and Spitzer imaging surveys (e.g., HUDF/XDF, GOODS, HUDF09/12 and CANDELS), as well as surveys of galaxy clusters like the Frontier Fields (HFF). Lensing clusters provide extraordinary opportunities for characterizing the faintest earliest galaxies, but also present extraordinary challenges. Together these surveys have reliably established the volume density of galaxies in the first billion years down to extremely faint levels around -14.5 mag. The results from deep UV luminosity functions from Hubble, combined with the recent results from Planck, indicate that galaxies dominate the UV ionizing flux that reionized the universe. Some of the greatest surprises have come from the discovery of very luminous galaxies at z~8-11, around 400-650 million years after the Big Bang. Spectroscopic followup of these very rare, bright galaxies has confirmed redshifts from z~7 to z~11, and revealed, surprisingly, strong Lyalpha emission near the peak of reionization when the HI fraction in the IGM is high. The small sizes of galaxies at high redshifts, from analysis of the HFF cluster samples, reveal objects that, remarkably, are as small as globular clusters and dwarf galaxies. The recent confirmation of a z=11.1 galaxy, just 400 million years after the Big Bang, by a combination of Hubble and Spitzer data, pushed Hubble into JWST territory, far beyond what we ever expected Hubble could do. Twenty years of astonishing progress with Hubble and Spitzer leave me looking to JWST to provide even more remarkable exploration of the realm of the first galaxies at "Cosmic Sunrise". The latest results on the sizes of distant galaxies, on the star formation rate density at z~10 and from Planck indicating that reionization began around z~10 together have significant implications for the detectability of the "first galaxies" with JWST.

Observations of celestial objects are inherently a 2D mapping on the sphere but astrophysical studies usually require the knowledge of 3D positions. For most extragalactic sources, this estimation relies on photometric redshifts which require strong assumptions and can lead to catastrophic failures. In this talk I will show how it is possible to use clustering measurements to infer redshifts for any type of extragalactic sources. I will show how to turn this idea into a new tool for redshift estimation and show how accurate it is. I will then present applications of this "clustering-redshift" technique using various datasets at UV, optical, IR and radio wavelengths, and will show a number of surprises.

Neutron stars are an incredibly versatile laboratory for studying physics, creating conditions that we cannot replicate on Earth. Over the last 5 decades, these laboratories have provided numerous breakthroughs, particular in the study of gravitation, where radio pulsar timing provided the first indirect evidence of gravitational waves and is poised to detect the low-frequency gravitational wave background created by binary supermassive black holes. What is remarkable is that so much of this progress has been made despite huge gaps in our knowledge about the laboratories themselves! In this talk I will discuss some of these gaps, the ongoing efforts to fill them in, and what the implications the success or failure of these efforts will have on future radio pulsar science with (for instance) the Square Kilometre Array.

Department of Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

I investigate the dependence of kinematic-based galaxy morphology on intrinsic colour and stellar mass in the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. I use intrinsic u-r colours and measure the fraction of kinetic energy invested in ordered corotation of 3562 galaxies at z=0 with stellar masses larger than 10^10 solar masses. I find that EAGLE produces a galaxy population whose morphology correlates with the colour bimodality for central and satellite galaxies alike. The red-sequence is mostly populated by elliptical-type galaxies and most of blue-cloud galaxies are disc-type. In this talk I will discuss these findings and through visual inspection of gri-composite images, I will show that kinematic morphology correlates strongly with visual morphology. Furthermore I will show the coevolution of color and morphology of EAGLE galaxies along with their merger history. Finally, I will discuss the impact of mergers on morphological transformations.

Both stellar mass black holes in transient X-ray binary systems (BHXBs) and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) spend most of their lives accreting very weakly compared to their Eddington luminosities (L_Edd), in the so-called quiescent regime (<1e-5 L_Edd). However, despite quiescence being the most common accretion state, there are still several open questions regarding the nature of accretion at such low luminosities. I will discuss how black hole accretion flows and their jets evolve while BHXBs transition into quiescence, largely by focusing on recent multiwavelength observations of the long orbital period BHXB V404 Cygni (which underwent a spectacular outburst in 2015, after spending 26 years in quiescence). I will also describe further changes exhibited by shorter-period black hole X-ray binaries, as they fade to the lowest detectable luminosities (~1e-9->1e-8 L_Edd), and how jet properties (e.g., particle acceleration, total power, etc.) may depend on accretion rate. The new constraints presented here anchor the low-luminosity end of the black hole accretion spectrum, thereby improving the utility of using radiative signatures to learn about highly sub-Eddington BHXBs and SMBHs (including, e.g., Sgr A* at the Galactic Centre), and also increasing the efficacy of using multiwavelength surveys to uncover new populations of weakly accreting black holes.

I will present some results in my main fields of study: the kinematics of disk galaxies and the Milky-Way nuclear wind. In the first part of the talk, I will address the problem of deriving reliable kinematics from low-resolution observations of star-forming galaxies: I will describe a new software (3D-Barolo) to fit three-dimensional tilted-ring models to emission-line data and I will show some significant applications of the algorithm both in the local and in the high redshift Universe. In the second part of the talk, I will review the current understanding of the Milky-Way galactic wind and I will illustrate how atomic hydrogen (HI) can be successfully used to infer the physical properties of the outflow.

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) played a vital role in the discovery of dark energy, almost two decades ago. Today, SNe Ia remain excellent distance indicators, and are instrumental to answering two of the most important questions in contemporary cosmology, at opposite ends of the distance scale: what is the value of the Hubble constant H0, and what is the nature of dark energy? Underlining both of these is the question of whether the standard LambdaCDM model can adequately describe our Universe, or if new physics is required to explain observations. In this talk I will discuss the current 'tension' between local SN Ia based measurements of H0, and values derived from Planck observations of CMB anisotropies assuming LambdaCDM. In particular, I will present my recent work to measure H0 using low-redshift SNe Ia, calibrated by Cepheid variables. This is a blind end-to-end reanalysis of Riess et al. 2011, revisited with an updated SN Ia analysis framework (including a covariance matrix based approach to error analysis) and a simultaneous fit to all data sets -- differences which increase the relative error in H0 compared to previous analyses of the same data set. With reference to this work, I will argue for the importance of blind analyses. Finally, I will summarise efforts of the Dark Energy Survey to use SNe Ia as one of four cosmological probes to measure dark energy, including major Australian contributions through OzDES, and outline future directions for contemporary supernova cosmology.

Virial shocks are expected to form around haloes, as well as around cosmic filaments and sheets. However, due to cooling, gas that accretes onto haloes and filaments does not always heat to the virial temperature, leading to unstable, free falling gas (a.k.a "cold flows"). I will summarize old theoretical results about accretion onto haloes, and present some recent work of gas accretion onto filaments.
Once cold flows penetrate through hot virialized haloes, supersonic Kelvin Helmholtz instability occurs, with specific patterns of unstable KH modes. Finally, as cold flows smash into the galaxy, magnetic fields can play a non-trivial role in the way this gas actually mixes with the ISM.

The Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) are widely recognised as valuable targets for the study of the processes of galaxy formation on small scales. However, there are a number of major outstanding questions (commonly referred to as the "Missing Satellites" and "Too Big To Fail" problems) whose resolution requires us to delve into the evolution of both the dark matter and baryonic components of dSphs. In this talk, I will discuss a new mass modelling technique which uses N-body simulations to estimate the masses of dSphs to much larger radii than has previously been possible. Using this approach, we have been able to constrain the mass of the Carina dSph both at the current epoch and at the time it fell into the Milky Way, finding a surprisingly low pre-infall mass. I will also present results from a study which uses the internal kinematics of dSphs to make predictions for the dark matter annihilation signals we might expect to see from their inner regions. Finally, I will discuss on-going work to study the baryonic processes which impact on the evolution of dSphs and which suggests that stochasticity in the star formation process in low-mass galaxies is responsible for the non-linearity of the mapping between simulated dark matter haloes and observed satellite galaxies.

Supermassive black holes that are rapidly accreting matter (and sometimes outshining their host galaxies) were the first sources discovered at cosmological redshifts. Despite progress in the intervening half-century, key questions remain about how black holes affect the evolution of their host galaxies, as well as how they self-regulate their own growth. I will discuss so-called "AGN feedback," which is a topic of intense theoretical and observational interest. I will focus in particular on what we are learning from multiwavelength observational studies of the nearest and brightest active galactic nuclei.

There has been a long-held belief that there should be a simple unifying physical model for quasars, similar to the primary characterisation of stars by their mass. However its form and shape has proven elusive. This quest has been partly frustrated by the fact that quasar geometry and emission is axi-symmetric. I will describe new results from our microlensing studies of macro-imaged quasars, that aim to develop a coherent picture of the inner regions of quasars, including the accretion disk and the broad emission line region.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world's largest radio telescope when Phase 1 is completed in the next decade. The past few years have seen great progress toward this goal, with construction to start in 2019 and science operations anticipated to begin in 2024. In this presentation I will provide a status update on SKA activities, with a focus on the science it will enable.

The intrinsic or true three-dimensional shape of galaxies is one of their most fundamental characteristic. Yet, due to projection effects, the true shape of galaxies is a difficult property to measure accurately. The most reliable method for inferring intrinsic shapes require large samples of spatially resolved stellar kinematic maps. Large IFU surveys are now enabling this type of science to be done accurately on carefully selected samples of galaxies. I am using the SAMI Galaxy Survey to uncover the intrinsic shape of various carefully selected galaxy samples. Preliminary results will be presented.

I will talk about recent work studying gas and star-formation in samples of galaxies. In particular, using the new xGASS survey, we have found unusually gas-rich and star-forming central galaxies in small groups, which we interpret as evidence of feeding from the cosmic web. At the other extreme, the ALFALFA HI survey is finding gas-rich galaxies with almost invisible stellar populations. These (almost) dark galaxies are exceptionally inefficient at forming stars and may be related to the recently re-discovered class of "ultra-diffuse" galaxies.

My research is in radio astronomy, in particular in the dynamic radio sky, using intelligent algorithms to find rare objects in large datasets. In 2013, along with a colleague and two PhD students I took a leap into the unknown and started a company "Grok Learning" that provides online computing education for school students, teachers and universities. We now have thousands of users from around the world, and a team of 10 staff including the founders.
In this talk I'll discuss how our academic training (as astronomers and computer scientists) was helpful in the business world, but also the challenges you might face. How does running your own business compare to a job in academia? What astronomy skills are useful in the business world? What should you do if you're interested in starting a business?
I'm happy to leave plenty of time for discussion, so bring your questions!