Star formation and early stellar evolution in the era of Gaia (Prof Rob Jeffries, Dr Nick Wright)

ESA’s Gaia astrometry satellite will shortly release its first astrometric catalogue, providing distances and velocities for a billion stars. The Gaia-ESO survey is a massive spectroscopic programme carried out at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) aiming to support Gaia in providing line-of-sight velocities and chemical abundances for some 100,000 stars. Professor Jeffries leads a group looking at ways of combining these datasets in young stellar clusters to revolutionise our understanding of the timescales for star formation and early stellar evolution and of cluster dynamics.

A PhD student would use the Gaia and Gaia-ESO datasets to select clean samples of stars in young stellar clusters and use these to test and calibrate stellar evolution models and age estimation techniques and to investigate the dynamical states of these clusters using state-of-the-art computational codes. The project will involve working with large, world-class datasets using advanced statistical techniques, and collaborating with a large network of European and US researchers.

For informal enquiries on this project, contact Prof Rob Jeffries by email: [Email Address Removed]

PhD available from September 2018 (flexible)

Please quote FNS GS 2017-20 on your application and the project title "Star formation and early stellar evolution in the era of Gaia (Prof Rob Jeffries, Dr Nick Wright)