Welcome to our astrophysics group at the University of Surrey. Our goal is to solve key problems in astrophysics: How do stars and galaxies form? What are dark matter and dark energy? How did the Milky Way form and evolve? And how did supermassive black holes form? We compare multi-scale numerical simulations to a host of observational data to answer these questions.

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  A new self-enrichment model for globular clusters

  New model for the origin of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters: a supermassive star forms at the same time as the cluster and “pollutes” in the first few Myrs the low-mass stars that survive until today. Key points: only a single generation of stars is needed, there is no mass budget problem and we provide testable predictions for observer: https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.04682v1.

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  A dark matter core in an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy

  We have developed a new technique that uses star clusters to probe the dark matter distribution in dwarf galaxies. Using this, we have found a dark matter core in a galaxy - Eridanus II - that is 500 times fainter than any dwarf previously measured. With just 80,000 solar masses in stars, this dark matter core may be difficult to understand if dark matter is the simple “cold” particle envisaged to date: https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.01820.

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  The devil is in the tails

  As part of the ERC CLUSTERS project, Dr Balbinot and Prof Gieles provide an explanation for the absence of tidal streams associated with massive clusters and the prominence of the Palomar 5 stream: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.02543.

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  A population of black holes in a globular cluster

  In a recent study by the astrophysics group in Surrey, it was found that the peculiar distribution of stars in the globular cluster NGC6101 can be explained by the presence of a large population of stellar-mass black holes http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.01720. A short video explaining the result can be found here.

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  Massive black hole, or radial orbits?

  The enigmatic globular cluster Omega Centauri was long thought to host an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). As part of her Newton International Fellowship research at the University of Surrey, Dr Alice Zocchi found that a realistic amount of radial orbit anisotropy reduces the need for an IMBH to explain the data: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00725.

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