External Seminars

The following talks take place at the Cavendish Laboratory or at the Insitute of Astronomy and are not organised by this group. However, they might by related to research that is done within this group at DAMTP.

The Detection of Galaxy Cluster Motions Using Data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and BOSS

Using microwave sky maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), the motions of galaxy clusters and groups were recently detected for the first time using CMB temperature distortions due to the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect. The positions of galaxy clusters in the ACT data were identified by their constituent luminous galaxies observed by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. The mean pairwise momentum of the objects was measured at high statistical significance. I will discuss the methodology and results of this analysis in the context of the standard cosmological model and will comment on possible continuations of this analysis in the future.

The curiously cold dark matter halos of Andromeda dwarf spheroidals

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The hot Jupiter WTS-2 b: Too close for comfort?

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Probing the Metal Content and Star-Formation Efficiency of Neutral Gas at High Redshifts

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3D Extinction Mapping Using Hierarchical Bayesian Models

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Forecast Skill and Predictability of observed Atlantic sea surface temperatures

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TBA

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Supernova Cosmology

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Dust in Galaxeis as Revealed by 1 and 2D Spectroscopy

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Second year applied mathematics PhD talks

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The Progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae

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Synchronisation of eukaryotic flagella

From unicellular organisms as small as a few microns to the largest vertebrates on earth we find groups of beating flagella or cilia that exhibit striking spatio-temporal organization. This may take the form of precise frequency and phase locking as frequently found in the swimming of green algae, or beating with long-wavelength phase modulations known as metachronal waves, seen in ciliates such as Paramecium and in our own respiratory systems. The remarkable similarity in the underlying molecular structure of flagella across the whole eukaryotic world leads naturally to the hypothesis that a similarly universal mechanism might be responsible for synchronization. Although this mechanism is poorly understood, one appealing hypothesis is that it results from hydrodynamic interactions between flagella. In this lecture I will discuss recent results using green algae as model organisms which provide the strongest evidence yet for the elastohydrodynamic origin of synchronisation.

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Portraits of other worlds on a red background: Characterising transiting exoplanets in the presence of stellar activity and correlated noise

Transiting exoplanets are extremely valuable because the transit geometry enables very detailed physical characterisation of the planets and host stars. However, the planetary signals of interest are often dwarfed by the host star’s intrinsic variability and by instrumental effects, both of which are stochastic and usually have a “red” power spectrum. In my talk I will introduce novel statistical methods imported from the machine learning literature, which enable us to learn the properties of the noise from the data. I will describe two applications: Hubble Space Telescope transmission spectroscopy of hot Jupiters and characterisation of stellar variability in Kepler data.

Sand ripples and dunes

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