Dr Will Sutherland Project Abstracts
BSc Project Abstracts
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
Baryon acoustic oscillations are created by sound waves in the baryon-photon plasma in the early universe; these both create the famous series of "acoustic peaks" in the microwave background, and also leave a faint imprint in the distribution of galaxies today; there is a slight excess of galaxy pairs separated by a distance near 450 million light years. This project will explore the ways in which observations of the BAO signature can be used to constrain cosmological parameters.
Some basic computations with Mathematica, Python or IDL will be required.
Dark matter in dwarf galaxies
The theory of cold dark matter is very successful on scales larger than the Milky Way, but has some problems on sub-galactic scales; in particular, it appears to predict too many dwarf galaxies and too much dark matter in the inner regions of large galaxies. This project will review this problem from both an observational and theoretical perspective, and study some possible solutions, including non-standard properties of dark matter.
MSci Review Project Abstracts
Surveys for High Redshift Quasars
Quasars are believed to be powered by supermassive black holes. The high- redshift quasars (redshift z > 6) are observed when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. They provide us with a probe of the early universe, and important constraints on the early growth of galaxies. Discovering them is a "needle in a haystack" problem, since there are roughly 1 million foreground stars to each high redshift quasar. This project will review the observational methods used, generally based on multi-colour imaging, to discover high redshift quasars.
MSci Research/Investigative Project Abstracts
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
Baryon acoustic oscillations are created by sound waves in the baryon-photon plasma in the early universe; these both create the famous series of "acoustic peaks" in the microwave background, and also leave a faint imprint in the distribution of galaxies today; there is a slight excess of galaxy pairs separated by a distance near 450 million light years. This project will explore the ways in which observations of the BAO signature can be used to constrain cosmological parameters.
Pre-requisites - some basic computations with Mathematica, Python or IDL will be required.
Dark matter in dwarf galaxies
The theory of cold dark matter is very successful on scales larger than the Milky Way, but has some problems on sub-galactic scales; in particular, it appears to predict too many dwarf galaxies and too much dark matter in the inner regions of large galaxies. This project will review this problem from both an observational and theoretical perspective, and study some possible solutions, including non-standard properties of dark matter.
