It has just been announced that the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute (JHI) of the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) has received grants totalling £1.2M from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. These were awarded in the areas of Astrophysics (£800k) and Solar Physics (£400k). The Director of the JHI, Professor Derek Ward-Thompson, said “These awards are tremendous recognition nationally for our outstanding research in the areas of Astrophysics and Solar Physics. They will allow us to build on our very strong research base within the JHI in the coming years”.
The grants will support post-doctoral researchers in the JHI, as well as paying for part of some academic staff members’ time, to allow them to carry out their research. The grants will also support the computing research infra-structure within the JHI. The research areas that will be supported include the study of solar eruptions and their effect on space weather on the Earth.
The JHI hosts the UK data centre for the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, which studies the rapid evolution of such features on the surface of the Sun. Other areas supported by these grants include the study of stellar oscillations using the NASA Kepler Space Telescope, which allows astronomers to ‘see’ into the centres of stars using seismology. Other projects supported by these grants include studying the evolution of galaxies and looking at the formation of stars and planets.
In the latter field, a collaboration between the JHI and the European Space Agency (ESA) involves using data from the ESA Herschel Space Telescope to look at stars and planetary systems that are currently being formed, and modelling their evolution using the UCLan High Performance Computing (HPC) Cluster. Staff and students, both post-graduate and under-graduate, within the JHI, will benefit from the results of this research.