No evidence for spin-powering of jets in black holes
Common disc-jet coupling in all black holes, from XRBs to AGN
I am Project Leader for LOFAR-UK, and we're very pleased to report that the LOFAR-UK Chilbolton station has been validated, opened, and is already taking live astronomical data. See a video of this here.
Even more excitingly, I have just been awarded a 3 MEuro ERC Advanced Investigator Grant to fund the 4 PI SKY project for five years. This means that faculty permanent, postdoc and PhD places are available NOW.
Anyway, welcome to my home page, which summarises briefly my research and non-research activities...
Research:
While most X-ray astronomers consider me to be a radio astronomer, radio astronomers consider me to be something else. In any case, I take a 'whatever tool is necessary' approach to tackling some problems in high-energy astrophysics, even occasionally talking to theorists.
Some of the astrophysical problems which attract my attention are..:
Jets
Jets somehow magically remove matter, energy and
(probably) angular momentum from the gravitational potential wells of
accreting objects. This phenomena takes this matter, accelerates it to
high (often relativistic) velocities and eventually deposits it back
into the ambient medium. I am interested in more all less all aspects
of the very poorly-understood phenomenon.
Black hole physics
Black holes are - to me at least - the most
fascinating objects in the universe: exotic predictions of general
relativity which appear to be real. These objects seed our universe on
all scales, from a few solar masses to billions. Observations of
relatively low mass black holes in X-ray binary systems indicate that
nearly all the time, nearly all black holes are producing
jets. Furthermore, black hole accretion and jet formation should be
essentially scale-invariant, which means that by studying
rapidly-varying low mass black holes in X-ray binaries, we can learn
about the evolution of supermassive black holes on cosmological
timescales.
Radio Transients
We are on the verge of the first era of wide-field monitoring of the variable radio sky,
which has the potential to reveal a completely new view of the explosive and dynamic
universe. The key to this is the wide fields of view which will be provided by a new
generation of radio facilities, en route to the Square Kiometre Array (SKA),
such as LOFAR, ASKAP and MeerKAT (see figure below).
I am heavily involved in the LOFAR project, in particular the Transients Key
Project, of which I am co-PI. We aim to have a radio all-sky monitor
by 2009 ! I am also Project Leader for LOFAR:UK, a multi-institution
project to build LOFAR stations in the UK.
I am also a co-I on both Transients programs on the Australian SKA Pathfinder
(ASKAP) program, CRAFT and VAST. Most recently, together with Patrick Woudt
at Cape Town I co-PIed a proposal ('ThunderKAT') for Radio Transients with the South African
SKA Pathfinder, MeerKAT.
Even more recently, my PhD student Martin Bell has submitted an
expression of interest for a Transients key program with APERTIF, the
WSRT focal plane arrays.
The Team
I work very closely (=rely on) students and postdocs in Southampton and
Amsterdam (where I retain an affiliation):
Mickael Coriat (STFC postdoc - accretion, from Oct 2010)
Jess Broderick (STFC postdoc - radio astronomy)
Gabriele Ponti (Marie Curie Fellow - X-ray astronomy)
Martin Bell (Southampton PhD student - radio transients)
Dan Calvelo (STFC PhD student - high energy astrophysics in radio)
Dan Plant (STFC PhD student - black hole spin)
Former members of the team include:
Elena Gallo (about to join the faculty at Michigan)
Simone Migliari (postdoc in Madrid)
Sebastian Jester (postdoc in Heidelberg)
Valeriu Tudose (postdoc at ASTRON)
Dave Russell (postdoc in Amsterdam)
Robert Dunn (postdoc, Garching)
Clement Cabanac (postdoc, Toulouse)
Elmar Koerding (faculty, Paris)
Omar Jamil (postdoc, Ohio)
Paolo Soleri (postdoc, Groningen)
Teaching and Committees:
I am Deputy Head of School for Research (DHoSR, not pronounced 'dosser'!)
From Feb 2011 I will be teaching the first year core Physics course Energy & Matter (thermodynamics).
I am currently a member of the following advisory panels:
STFC Far-Universe Advisory Panel (FUAP)
STFC SKA Design Study (SKADS) / PrepSKA steering committee
Dutch NWO VIDI selection committee
I was a member of the 2009 STFC Ground-Based Facilities Review
I am also the UK representative on the LOFAR International Working Group.