Vacation Scholarships in Astronomy at CAS
The Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing (CAS) accepts applications for Vacation Scholarships from enthusiastic university students with excellent scholastic records who are in the last, or second last, year of their undergraduate degree.
With more than a dozen research faculty and over 25 post-docs and PhD students, CAS is a vibrant, 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 - The Green Machine. We also develop advanced immersive 3D data visualization facilities and create 3-D animations and movies promoting and explaining astronomy to the broader community.
Swinburne's Hawthorn campus is situated in a lively, urban setting just minutes by public transport from Melbourne's city centre.
Our Vacation Scholarship program 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 maybe 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 some of the data or conducting theoretical calculations or advanced simulations. Many previous students have eventually published peer-reviewed research articles on some of their Vacation Scholarship research.
Applications can be made at any time throughout the year. We particularly encourage applicants to work over the summer months, December to February.
This program is open to undergraduates at Australian & New Zealand universities. Applications from students outside of Australia & New Zealand with exceptional scholastic records may also be considered.
Scholarships will generally last between 6 and 10 weeks, to be negotiated between the student and their nominated supervisor. Vacation Scholars are paid a stipend of $500 per week.
The usual eligibility requirement is that applicants should currently be undertaking a BSc or similar degree.
Applications should include the following:
The cover letter is important and should
(i) set out why you are interested in undertaking a vacation scholarship at Swinburne and
(ii) list at least two research projects you are interested in working on. See below for the current list of projects on offer.
Potential Vacation Scholarship research projects
The following list outlines particular projects currently on offer. Contact the staff member(s) listed for more information. Other projects, not listed here, may be possible; contact the staff member whom you feel is most suited to your ideas and discuss other possible projects of mutual interest.
(Updated 12/03/2009)Finding the brightest quasars in the sky. A long-time ambition (dream?) of many cosmologists is to watch the expansion of the Universe change in real time by tracking the drift of galaxies caught up in the Hubble flow. This effect is so tiny that it requires the future generation of optical telescopes -- the so-called Extremely Large Telescopes -- to observe distant quasars at two epochs 20 years apart! Even then, only some of the brightest quasars in the sky would be useful for the experiment. This project aims to identify bright objects in large sky surveys which are likely to be distant quasars. If several candidates can be identified, the student may propose observations on the Gemini 8-m telescope to confirm that the candidates are really quasars and to measure their redshifts spectroscopically. Supervisors: Dr. Michael Murphy & Dr. Glenn Kacprzak
Gas-rich dwarf galaxies. The discovery of the lowest luminosity gas-rich dwarf galaxy, Leo T has sparked a renewed interest in gas-dominated satellites of the Milky Way and Local Group of galaxies. The number of galaxies in the Local Group predicted by cosmological simulations is typically of the order of hundreds - far more than the number detected to-date. This project will address the issue of the how many gas-rich dwarf galaxies exist in orbit around the Milky Way. The student will use neutral hydrogen data from the Galactic All Sky Survey conducted with the Parkes Telescope. Supervisor: Dr. Emma Ryan-Weber.
HI in the Ursa Major Cluster. This project will look at 21-cm data for the Ursa major cluster. The student will catalogue and find new galaxies, and look at the gas content of the galaxies within the cluster. On-line optical data will be used to determine if any galaxies are gas-deficient, and to investigate interactions that might be going on in the cluster. Supervisor: Dr. Virginia Kilborn.
Optimization of an Airglow Filter for the distant Universe.An airglow filter could allow the discovery of very high redshift z>7 star-forming galaxies but is a challenging instrumentation problem. Finding the best design for such a device at a given manufacturing cost is an interesting mathematical problem to be coded via genetic or Monte-Carlo algorithms. Supervisors: Prof. Karl Glazebrook & Dr. Paul Stoddart (Applied Optics).
Searching for variations in the fundamental constants with quasar spectra. The constants of Nature play a central role in our fundamental physical theories. But the fact that these theories cannot predict the constants' values is one hint a more fundamental, "grand unified theory" linking all physical interactions is needed. Perhaps surprisingly, the absorption lines seen in the spectra of extremely distant quasars offer a fairly clean and precise probe of the values of some fundamental constants early in the Universe's history. Depending on the students' interests, several different projects can be undertaken within this broader topic area. Some focus on data from the Very Large Telescope in Chile, others focus on better ways of analysis those data. Supervisors: Dr. Michael Murphy & Adrian Malec
The distribution of galaxy mass. A fundamental ingredient to our understanding of galaxy assembly is the galaxy mass distribution in the local universe. What we would like to do is to measure the total DYNAMICAL mass of stars and dark matter by measuring galaxy rotation ('circular velocities'). The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) offers a very large sample for potentially doing this over a representative cosmic volume. The project is to see if SDSS emission line widths can be calibrated to yield circular velocities and, if so, to determine the 'circular velocity distribution' of the Universe. Supervisors: Prof. Karl Glazebrook & Andy Green.
Velocity Dispersion of Red Nuggets. Red nuggets are an interesting new class of very compact massive elliptical galaxies which have be discovered in the early Universe. Their evolution to today is a mystery. The project is to make a composite spectrum of red nuggets, from existing data, compare with the other ellipticals at the same redshifts, and see if the velocity dispersion can be measured. The latter is a key ingredient in solving the problem as different theories make very different predictions for this quantity. Supervisor: Prof. Karl Glazebrook.