Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Star Formation

Fixed term for 3 years

Funded by the EU, you will work with Dr Stuart Lumsden and Professor Rene Oudmaijer on the observational study of clustering of stars and gas in young massive stellar clusters.

The Astrophysics Group in Leeds is leading a network, comprising Cardiff University, Université Grenoble Alpes and a Spanish scientific software company Quasar Science Resources, S.L., on the project “StarFormMapper” (via call H2020-COMPET-2015).  This programme aims to understand the formation and dissolution of the clustered environments in which massive stars form, by exploiting existing data from Herschel and up-coming data from Gaia.

Understanding mass segregation at the earliest stages is the key to understanding how young massive stellar clusters form and evolve (as well as the stars within them) and that is the eventual goal of this project. Your role will initially be to work with your colleagues in Grenoble on identifying substructure in young massive clusters, in particular in identifying how sub-structure in the gas and dust relates to that in the stars. You will test and develop appropriate statistical methods through application to simulated datasets provided by the Cardiff node before comparing those results with catalogues of Gaia stellar data and Herschel dust maps. Your work will feed into a software environment being developed by Quasar SR, which will provide a public portal to this project.

Further details can be found at: http://jobs.leeds.ac.uk/MAPPA1032