Durham Astronomy Consolidated Grant 2014-2017

由于它所解决的问题的性质，天文学吸引了公众的想象力，达到了只有极少数其他科学分支能与之匹敌的程度。只要抬头仰望夜空，看星星和月亮，每个人都可以立即到达它。这引发了人们对地球、恒星和太阳系起源的质疑，以及自文明诞生以来宇宙的起源。在过去的20年里，天文学中出现了一个标准模型，用于描述我们宇宙的组成部分，以及宇宙中所有结构的起源和演化。根据这个模型，我们生活在一个宇宙中，所有质量能量的至少三分之二现在以暗能量场的形式存在，暗能量场正在导致宇宙以不断增加的速度膨胀。大约四分之一存在于暗物质中，这很可能是一种尚未在地球上探测到的新的弱相互作用基本粒子。只有剩下的5%是普通的或重子物质，其中只有大约十分之一在恒星中，而地球等行星和其余的大部分以气体的形式存在于星系之间的空间。暗物质和重子物质形成的结构是由量子涨落播种的，在大爆炸最早的瞬间，量子涨落印在了宇宙的密度场上。它们在接近均匀的原始等离子体中产生了微弱的声波，在宇宙只有40万年时发出的大爆炸遗留下来的热量上留下了明显的印记。这些微小的涟漪成长为我们今天在宇宙中看到的丰富的结构：星系、星团、星系团和更大规模的结构。正是这种从近乎均匀的原始汤汁到宇宙结构网络的转变是我们提议的重点。我们的计划将尖端理论研究与宇宙最早阶段的理论和观测项目结合在一起，以确定宇宙中结构的形成和演化，并利用我们最新的观测结果来对抗我们模型的预测，同时利用达勒姆正在进行的仪器开发。我们将重点关注星系在宇宙中最早的时候的演化，以及它们的环境对其性质的影响。我们将利用地面天文台和地球轨道卫星上的最新仪器和理论模型，研究黑洞的形成和演化，以及它们在确定星系和更大尺度结构的结构和性质中的作用。

By the nature of the questions it addresses, Astronomy attracts the imagination of the public to an extent that only very few other branches of science can match. It is immediately accessible to every human by simply gazing up into the night sky to look at the stars and the Moon. This has provoked questions about the origins of the Earth, stars and our Solar System, as well as the origins of the Universe since the dawn of civilisation.The past twenty years have seen the emergence of a standard model in Astronomy for the constituents of our Universe, as well as for the origin and evolution of all structure within it. According to this model, we live in a universe where at least two thirds of all mass-energy is now in the form of a dark energy field which is causing the Universe to expand at an ever increasing rate. About a quarter is in dark matter, most probably a new weakly interacting elementary particle yet to be detected on Earth. Only the remaining 5 percent is ordinary, or baryonic, matter of which at the present-day only about a tenth is in stars and the planets such as the Earth and the rest resides mostly as gas in the space between galaxies.The structures formed by dark and baryonic matter were seeded by quantum fluctuations imprinted in the density field of the Universe at the earliest instants of the Big Bang. These produced weak sound waves in the near-uniform primordial plasma that left observable imprints on the heat left over from the Big Bang, emitted when the Universe was only 400,000 years old. These tiny ripples grew into the full richness of structures we see around us in the Universe today: galaxies, groups, clusters and larger-scale structures. It is this transformation from a near-uniform primordial soup to a cosmic web of structure that is the focus of our proposal.Our programme knits together cutting-edge theoretical research into the earliest phases of the Universe with theoretical and observational projects to determine the formation and evolution of structure in the Universe and to confront the predictions of our models with our latest observational results, while exploiting instrumentation developments being pursued in Durham. We will focus on the evolution of galaxies back to the earliest times in the Universe and the influence which their environment has had on their properties. We will investigate the formation and evolution of black holes and their role in determining the structure and properties of galaxies and larger scale structures, using the latest instruments on ground-based observatories and Earth-orbiting satellites and theoretical models.