Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Jee (University of California, Davis), and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University)

Imperial Astrophysics

Exploring the Universe’s deepest mysteries - from black holes to the origins of galaxies - through world-leading research and discovery at Imperial.

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Explore our research, group members, news, events and opportunities.

News

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Imperial researchers team up with NASA to launch new citizen science study

17 April 2023

news

Space mission to Jupiter’s icy moons launches with Imperial-built kit on board

14 April 2023

Events

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Astrostatistics: Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology

ICIC aims to address the statistical challenges posed by massive and complex data streams in astrophysics, astroparticle physics, and cosmology. It is a collaborative effort between the Astrophysics Group and the Statistics Section at Imperial College London. We are spearheading the establishment of astrostatistics as a discipline capable of providing accurate, robust and insightful answers to complex theoretical problems in astrophysics, cosmology and astroparticle physics.

Stars, planets and origins

The detection of extrasolar planets over the past decade ranks among the most exciting and remarkable advances in the history of astronomy. More than five thousand such bodies have been found so far, spanning masses and radii from super-Jovians to sub-Earths, and arrayed in a diversity of architectures ranging from gas giants in orbits smaller than Mercury’s to multiple planets in orbits analogous to those in the Solar System. As the planetary menagerie swells, the focus has shifted to the fundamental underlying questions: How do these planets form, what range of environments might they be found in, how do their properties depend on those of the host star, and what is their potential for habitability?

21cm cosmology

The Astrophysics group is at the forefront of developing statistical techniques for analysis of 21cm radiation from neutral hydrogen. This signal, which in principle contains a wealth of information about the state and evolution of the Universe, is challenging to analyse because of large foregrounds. Much of the work in the group focusses on how to deal with these foregrounds, in preparation for the Square Kilometre Array.

Image credit: SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions; CC BY 3.0, https://www.skatelescope.org/copyright/

Extra-Galactic Astronomy

Extra-Galactic astronomy is an incredibly broad topic which covers all observations of objects outside of our own Milky Way galaxy. All such observations must be interpreted in the context of an expanding Universe, which induces a cosmological redshift, and with look-back times that can be an appreciable fraction of the (current) age of the Universe. Particularly at the high redshifts and large look-back times that are the focus of the Group’s research efforts, the focus is on observing the evolution of the cosmological populations over cosmic time, with a particular focus on dusty star-forming galaxies and high-redshift quasars.

Cosmology, gravitational wave, and microwave background

Cosmology is the science of studying the Universe as a whole, its origin, its composition and its properties. We are interested in investigating the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds, and in developing and deploying advanced statistical techniques to compare theory and observations.

Missions and facilities

The Astrophysics Group is involved in a wide range of major projects covering areas of astrophysics from the local galactic environment to the cosmic microwave background and the beginning of the Universe. Some of these use major satellite observatories, such as the Herschel and Planck satellites launched in the middle of 2009, and Euclid satellite, launch 2023. Others use existing ground-based observatories such as the James Clarke Maxwell Telescope, Square Kilometre Array, Rubin Observatory, and Simons Observatory.