Annual Report 2005.pdf - School of Physics - University of Melbourne

Group Reports & Publications>
31
ASTROPHYSICS
PROF RACHEL WEBSTER
The Astrophysics group has continued its strong
research program and its commitment to a
successful research training program.
Dr Stuart Wyithe was appointed to the new
faculty position in the group in 2004. He has
continued his research collaboration with
Professor Avi Loeb at Harvard, working on the
Epoch of Reionisation and the formation and
evolution of supermasssive black holes. During
2005, Stuart has started supervising his first PhD
student, Jhan Srbinovsky, working on the Epoch
of Reionisation.
Dr Andrew Melatos has further developed his
models of gravitational radiation from accreting
neutron stars, with promising predictions for
the possibilities of detecting this radiation
with the current generation of long baseline
interferometers such as LIGO. In addition, Dr
Melatos published the results of his Gemini
observations of the Crab pulsar wind nebula. His
collaboration with PhD student Peralta and Dr
Andrew Ooi’s group in Mechanical Engineering
at Melbourne yielded new results in superfluid
hydrodynamics, with laboratory applications.
Dr David Barnes resigned to follow his passion
of photography. Dr Barnes has made a
substantial contribution to the development of
the Australian Virtual Observatory, www.ausvo.org,
and also to the ongoing analysis of the
HIPASS dataset.
Professor Rachel Webster continued her work
on the microlensing of lensed quasars, a project
which will develop new techniques to measure
the sizes of quasar emission regions. This
program was supported by a large allocation
of Gemini time. Professor Webster was the
inaugural Caroline Herschel Distinguished
Lecturer at the Space telescope Science Institute
in June 2005.
During 2005, the Melbourne group worked with
collaborators at MIT and Harvard to deploy 3
tiles at Mileura Station in WA. This project was
managed by David Barnes, who was assisted
by Jamie Stevens, Randall Wayth and Chris
Johnston. The deployment was spectacularly
successful, with at least two publishable results
from the first datasets.
Five PhDs were awarded in the group in 2005:
Drs Donald Payne, Cathy Trott, Randall Wayth,
Arna Karick and Jamie Stevens. In addition,
PhD student Ivy Wong spent a year working at
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, with
Dr Gerhardt Meurer, and PhD student Matthias
Vigelius spent two months at Harvard, working
with Prof Bryan Gaensler. Research Fellows Neil
Killeen and Mark Dijkstra also joined the Astro
group.