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Vacation Studentships in Astronomy at CAS

The Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) is accepting applications for Vacation Studentships from enthusiastic university students with excellent scholastic records who are in the last, or second last, year of their undergraduate or Honours/Masters degree.

With 29 research faculty, 19 postdoctoral researchers, and nearly 50 PhD students, CAS is large, vibrant, and friendly environment for studying most fields of astronomy. Swinburne astronomers have guaranteed access to the twin Keck 10-m Telescopes in Hawaii - the world's premier optical observatory - and CAS owns and operates one of Australia's most powerful supercomputers - OzSTAR. We also develop advanced, immersive 3D data visualization facilities to promote and explain astronomy to the broader community. Swinburne now hosts an impressive Virtual Universe (SVU), a 100+ square metre stereoscopic LED wall - a wraparound digital canvas that delivers high resolution 3D visuals. Summer vacation students will be treated to an SVU show that blends real scientific data with cinematic visuals - from the birth of stars to the collision of black holes.

Our Vacation Studentship programme aims to provide undergraduate students with some insight into how exciting research is and how it is conducted. Students will join a research project, or possibly help start a new one, in one of the many areas of astronomy in which CAS staff and post-docs are experts. The various projects on offer are listed below. Projects can involve all aspects of astronomical research, from proposing or carrying out new telescope observations, to analysing data, to conducting theoretical calculations or advanced simulations. Many previous students have eventually published peer-reviewed research articles on some of their Vacation Studentship research.

In 2026 this programme is expected to run in-person at Swinburne and will be available to students currently enrolled at universities in Australia and New Zealand. Swinburne's Hawthorn campus is situated in a lively, urban setting just minutes by public transport from Melbourne's city centre.

Projects are expected to run over 8 weeks, between November and February, with the timing to be negotiated between the student and their nominated supervisor. Vacation students are paid a tax-free stipend of $750 per week. An additional $250 is available for students based in New Zealand to offset the increased cost of relocation.

Applications are now open and should be received before 31st August 2026; they should include the following:

  • Responses to the application form questions, detailing why you are interested in undertaking a vacation studentship at Swinburne, your plans for further study, and your project preferences;
  • A copy of your official academic record, including an explanation of the grading system used;
  • Your Curriculum Vitae;
  • Proof of enrolment at an Australian or New Zealand university;
  • Any supporting documentation of previous research;
  • Applicants must also ask a lecturer or supervisor at their current university to send a letter of recommendation by the due date. This should be sent by the lecturer/supervisor directly; applicants should not include reference letters in their own application.

To apply, complete the application form and arrange for reference letters to be emailed directly to Dr. Daniel Reardon (dreardon@swin.edu.au) before 31st August.



Potential Vacation Studentship Research Projects

The following list outlines particular projects currently on offer. Other projects not listed here may also arise. If you have questions, contact Dr. Daniel Reardon at the above email.

(Last Updated 10th August 2026)

  • Are pulsars scattered asymmetrically?

    Pulsars are extremely dense and magnetised objects formed from the cores of massive stars after they explode in supernovae. We observe pulsars using radio light emitted from their magnetic poles. Before reaching the observer, their light is scattered by plasma in space (the interstellar medium). Sometimes, the scattered light appears to prefer certain directions creating asymmetry in the distribution of light. In this project, the student would measure the strength of asymmetry in the scattering of several pulsars and see if there are trends in the asymmetry.

    Supervisor: Dr. Ashley Stock


  • Finding new radio pulsars in nearby galaxies using the MeerKAT telescope

    Pulsars are “dead” collapsed stars that are amongst the most extreme objects of the Universe - they are the fastest spinning stars (usually, they undergo one complete revolution in less than a few seconds); they are the smallest and densest stars, with approximately the mass of our Sun contained in a radius of a few tens of kilometres; and they have the strongest stellar magnetic fields. Their lighthouse-like radio beams are observed as faint radio pulses from the Earth. While nearly 4000 pulsars have been found in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, only about 60 extragalactic pulsars have been found owing to how distant they are. In this project, you will use a dataset from the state-of-the-art South African radio telescope MeerKAT to search for some of these rare pulsars outside of our galaxy using innovative data curation techniques.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr. Emma Carli


  • Do galactic outflows kill galaxies?

    Why do massive galaxies stop forming stars? One of the prime suspects is galactic outflows – powerful winds driven by stellar explosions and black hole activity that eject gas from galaxies into intergalactic space. By removing the cold hydrogen gas needed to form new stars, these outflows may play a central role in transforming star-forming galaxies into quiescent systems that are no longer growing. In this project, the student will use data from big observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope to measure outflows from distant galaxies, observed as they were billions of years ago, and investigate how these outflows impact the future growth of their host galaxies.

    Supervisor: Dr. Rebecca Davies


  • Catching elusive supernova UV bursts and shock-breakouts

    Supernovae are the deaths of massive stars or white dwarf stars in interacting/merging binary systems. The types of stars that cause each supernova type has been theorised, but has remained largely unclear observationally. Understanding which type of star that cause each supernova type helps understand their explosion mechanisms, their binary star system formation and dynamics, mass accretion or mass stripping, element formation, and their overall nature, particularly as some are used for cosmological tools. Detecting elusive and fast-evolving (minutes-to-day durations) UV bursts and shock-breakouts can help solve this problem. This project will use the unique Deeper, Wider, Faster (DWF) program dataset that coordinates the world’s most powerful wide-field telescopes operating at all wavelengths (radio through gamma-ray) taking fast (seconds to minutes) cadenced observations to detect fast-evolving transients. These data provide the necessary deep and densely-sampled wide-field images with a cadence faster than any other survey, to detect these events. In this project, we will use the DWF data to identify and study the many supernovae discovered by the program and search for those caught on the first day of outburst to search for fast UV burst and supernova shock-breakout signatures.

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeff Cooke


  • Hearing is believing - and powerful for research

    Data sonification is the process of converting data into sound. Data sonification has been used for a wide variety of purposes and mostly for niche applications over the years. However, the field has been growing very quickly over the last decade and the use of data sonification to enhance and improve scientific research is still relatively new. Our group has developed tools to exploit the power of human hearing to advance astronomy research in much needed areas, such as detecting low signal-to-noise ratio data, detecting transient sources quickly, and enabling multi-parameter space research (e.g., studying 10 or more properties of a source in a single tone). In this project, we will explore advancing our sonification tools in these areas, with the aim to quantify the impact data sonification has over visual or other data analysis methods and its use in verifying tentative results obtained via other methods. In addition, the project tools and applications will help individuals that are blind or have vision impairment contribute significantly to scientific research and to help with their everyday quality of life.

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeff Cooke


  • Where do supernovae live?

    Supernovae are exploding stars, some come from massive stars collapsing at the end of their lives, others from a white dwarf in a binary system pulling in too much material from its companion star. These explosions seed the Universe with heavy elements, are bright enough to see across huge cosmic distances, and stay visible for weeks or months.

    A new telescope at the Rubin Observatory is now finding hundreds of supernovae every night. You'll get to work with Fink, one of the projects that receives these detections within minutes of the telescope spotting them. You will pick out promising supernova candidates from the Fink data stream, then figure out which galaxy each one exploded in using radio and optical images, helping us learn more about the environments that produce these events.

    Supervisor: Dr. Anais Möller


  • How do galaxies in clusters assemble their stellar mass?

    The history of how galaxies formed their stars across cosmic time is a key prediction of our theories of galaxy evolution. Constraining these evolutionary models requires mapping the assembly history of galaxies (the rate at which galaxies form stars as a function of time) across different galactic environments. It is well known from large statistical studies that the star formation rate across the Universe peaked about 3.3 billion years ago and has been declining since. However, it remains largely unknown how various evolutionary processes affect stellar mass assembly in different parts of galaxies, and how galactic assembly histories differ between environments. In this project, we will perform a detailed analysis of the assembly history of one galaxy from the Virgo cluster, observed by the MAUVE galaxy survey. We will map the star formation history at different parts of the galactic disc with unprecedented spatial resolution. This result will greatly inform our understanding how evolutionary processes in galaxy clusters affect star formation history across the full spatial extent of galaxies. This project will lay the methodological groundwork for expanding the analysis to the full MAUVE survey sample and testing how assembly histories change across different parts of a galactic cluster.

    Supervisor: Dr. Andrei Ristea


  • Understanding how disc galaxies form bars

    Galaxies in our Universe can be broadly classified, based on their physical appearance, into ellipticals and disks. Unlike their elliptical counterparts, about two thirds of disc galaxies (including our own Milky Way) display a peculiar morphological feature – a galactic bar. Understanding the formation of galactic bars requires a detailed analysis of how stars rotate in the bar region. Recent advancements in analysis techniques which incorporate bar-like rotation have shown promise in significantly improving our models of galactic bars. Such methodologies have, however, only been successfully applied to a couple of nearby galaxies, to date. A robust understanding of galactic bar formation can only be obtained from studying a statistically significant sample of barred galaxies of various sizes and masses. In this project we will test recent methods for dynamically modelling galactic bars (using the Schwarzchild orbit superposition method) on a barred galaxy from the largest kinematic survey of nearby-Universe galaxies - MaNGA. If proven successful, this method could be applied to a larger sample of barred galaxies from MaNGA, thus greatly expanding our understanding of galactic bar formation.

    Further Reading:

    Supervisor: Dr. Andrei Ristea


  • Axion Dark Matter Detection – Data Acquisition and Analysis

    The nature of dark matter is one of the biggest mysteries in modern science – it makes up five sixths of the matter in the Universe, and is of unknown composition. It surrounds and passes through the Earth at all times. Axions are a hypothetical particle, and one of the leading candidates for dark matter. Swinburne is building a new axion detector to try and measure small effects induced by dark matter when it passes through the laboratory. The kind of experiment we are building is called an axion haloscope. The hope is that if the dark matter is made of axions, the detector can shed some light on its properties. The detector is being physically constructed and will be hosted at Swinburne – but work needs to be done on the software and analysis side. This project will focus on a data acquisition and analysis pipeline for the new axion dark matter detector. You will be working on code to interface with laboratory equipment, acquire new experimental data, and then tease through that data looking for hints of new physics.

    Supervisor: Dr. Ben McAllister


  • Studying Exploding Galaxies with Giant Telescopes

    In starburst galaxies, supernovae explosions push gas up out of the galaxy and into the cosmos above. We call these ‘galactic winds’. Galactic winds change the properties of the galaxy, and are considered by most theories to be a linchpin that regulates the growth of galaxies. Yet, there is not currently any theory that successfully explains their properties. This is, therefore, a very active field of research that will place you well for future work. Our team views this as faint filaments of gas that extends above star forming galaxies using the largest telescope. The physical properties of the gas directly relate to the physical models of how these large outflows of gas evolve and shape outflows. We will use data from the Keck 10 meter telescope in combination with James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to study the physical properties of extreme star forming galaxies.

    Supervisor: A. Prof. Deanne Fisher


  • Discovering and doing science with the most distant supernovae

    The Roman Space Telescope (Roman) is the newest NASA observatory to be launched on August 30, 2026, capable of imaging large areas of the sky to extreme depths in the infrared. We have been awarded a program to use Roman in its first 3 years to image a wide field much deeper than has ever been done before, called the Roman eXtreme Deep Field (RXDF). These data will detect hundreds of supernovae in the very distant Universe (redshifts z ∼ 2–15) and back in time to the supernova deaths of the very first stars to have formed after the Big Bang. This project will model the expected RXDF data to help determine the number, types, and redshift distribution of supernovae Roman will discover and, crucially, the values for the redshift range (z ∼ 2–4) – a redshift range where we can obtain both the rest-frame UV and rest-frame optical data of the same supernovae to establish the much-needed supernova UV classification system. That system will enable researchers to do science with all existing and future z > 2 supernovae discovered, which would otherwise not be possible.

    Supervisor: Prof. Jeff Cooke