Dr. Philip Wiseman

Joined 2017

My expertise lies in utilising the host galaxies of supernovae and other transients to discover more about the explosions themselves. I have created a very deep set of images based on data from the Dark Energy Survey. This catalogue is being used to investigate the host galaxy properties of Type Ia Supernovae (see Lisa’s work) as well as more exotic objects, such as Rapidly Evolving Transients. I am passionate about diversity, I chair of the Astronomy Group Diversity Working Group and sit on the Physics and Astronomy ED&I committee.

Dr. Chris Frohmaier

Joined 2013-2017, 2020-

I am the LSST:UK Senior Research Fellow working within the Time-Domain Extragalactic Survey (TiDES). I lead the survey strategy and simulations for TiDES to maximise the number of supernovae, supernova host-galaxies, and AGN we will observe. TiDES will feed from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) to collect the largest ever spectroscopic sample of SNe and their hosts. We will use these data to make the most precise measurement of the dark energy equation-of-state to-date.

Lisa Kelsey

Started 2017

My research primarily focuses on the host galaxies of Type Ia Supernovae in order to determine how the observed properties of the supernova are affected by the physical parameters of the host. Using a large sample of supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey, I compare local environmental properties within a fixed location around the supernova explosion sites with global host galaxy properties in order to test standardisation parameters, and gain insight into potential causes of the residual dispersion in Type Ia luminosities.

Tomás Müller Bravo

Started 2017

I am interested in Type Ia supernovae as distance indicators, the physics of Type II supernovae (like the explosion mechanism), and on other types of supernovae in general (e.g., core-collapse, superluminous). My interests also lie in data science (e.g. deep learning) and coding in Python. I am an active member of ePESSTO+ where I am incharge of the data-reduction pipeline. My current work focuses on PISCOLA, a data-driven SNIa fitting code and on the light curve analysis to find an alternative parameterisation to improve the precision in distance measurements.

Matt Grayling

Started 2018

I study core-collapse supernovae, analysing the properties of objects in the Dark Energy Survey and comparing them to other samples as well as looking in detail at particularly interesting individual objects.

Marcus Toy

Started 2020

I'm currently investigating the differences in optical properties of supernovae hosted within galaxy clusters compared to those hosted within the field. I'm also looking at any differences in their host properties, as this may give better insight as to the underlying cause of any optical differences.

Zoe Zontou

Started 2020

I am looking at supernovae in the faintest and lowest metallicity host galaxies. I have been using data from the Dark Energy Survey to create and look at Hubble Diagram residuals and determine the values for the nuisance parameters in an assumed flat LambdaCDM universe. I am currently looking at the host galaxy masses of the SNe to determine whether there is possibly any correlation between the Hubble residuals and the host galaxies; I will also focus on SNe within the DES X3 field to hopefully discover any missing information about their host galaxies.