Solar System PhD Projects
PhD Research Projects on offer in our Solar System Group:
Unveiling the mysteries of interstellar visitors
Comets are some of the most pristine relics of planetary formation, and their nuclei preserve invaluable clues about the conditions prevailing in the protoplanetary disk at the time of their formation. They are thus incredible tools to study the history of planetary systems. Cometary science has made huge progresses in the past decades, especially thanks to the Rosetta mission. However, numerous questions are still left to answer. Thanks to the discovery of interstellar objects, we now have a new tool to probe the conditions prevailing in protoplanetary discs in other systems and how they impact the composition of planetesimals formed in these systems. Already, studies of the first 3 interstellar objects have showed very interesting differences between these objects and our own comets. With the Vera Rubin Observatory starting its LSST survey before the end of the year, we expect more discoveries in the coming year, opening an incredibly exciting era for the study of interstellar objects.
This project will focus on using observations with a range of spectrographs and IFUs on the Very Large Telescope and others, to measure the abundance of gas species in the atmosphere of interstellar objects, map their spatial distribution, and compare it to solar system comets. The project will start with existing observations of 3I/ATLAS, with future observations of new interstellar object to be led by the student later on.
Early Solar System Science with LSST
Dr James Robinson and Prof Colin Snodgrass
The Rubin Observatory is very nearly complete; the telescope has recently been officially turned over from the commissioning to operations team. The primary objective of the Rubin Observatory is to conduct the ten-year-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which is due to start in early 2026. Every night, LSST will image the visible Southern Sky and, using difference imaging, it will rapidly detect transient and moving astrophysical objects. LSST discoveries will provide us with an unprecedented increase in the inventory of solar system objects (SSOs: asteroids and comets), which are the remnants and tracers of Solar System formation and evolution. LSST will provide information on observed SSOs via real-time public alerts. This provides the opportunity to rapidly identify changes in objects (e.g., cometary outbursts, fragmentation, collisions) as well as announcing the discovery of time sensitive objects (e.g., hazardous near-Earth objects or interstellar objects).
Most SSOs will be discovered in the first few years of the survey, and then receive a steady stream of additional detections as the survey progresses. Therefore, in order to characterise the most interesting SSOs in the early survey, it will be necessary to enhance the initially few LSST detections with other data. For example, dense-in-time light curves can provide estimates of an SSO's shape and spin state. Observations in additional filters and spectrographic measurements inform us of an SSO's surface composition.
This project will involve working closely with the large volume of nightly data produced by LSST, which is accessed primarily via the dedicated Rubin Science Platform. The challenge will be to identify the most interesting SSOs and phenomena in the "data avalanche". The data from LSST must then be combined with other surveys and targeted observations in order to model and characterise these SSOs. The volume and depth of the data from LSST is breaking new ground for the Solar System science ccommunity,and so the student will be actively involved in the push to develop new methods and models to interpret this data.