Durham Astronomy Consolidated Grant 2017-2020

天文学吸引着公众的想象力，其程度是很少有其他科学分支可以比拟的——这在很大程度上是由于它所解决的问题的基本性质：宇宙的起源和我们在其中的位置。每个人只要抬头仰望夜空，看看月亮、行星和星星，就能立即接触到天文学。自文明之初，这就引发了关于地球、恒星和太阳系起源的问题，以及宇宙起源的问题。在过去的三十年里，我们看到了宇宙学中一个标准模型的出现，它描述了我们宇宙的组成部分，以及对宇宙中所有结构的起源和演化的合理解释。根据这个模型，我们生活的宇宙中，至少有三分之二的质能现在以暗能量场的形式存在，这导致宇宙以不断增加的速度膨胀。大约四分之一的质能以暗物质的形式存在，很可能是一种新的弱相互作用的基本粒子，尚未在地球上被探测到（因此粒子物理学家对此非常感兴趣）。只有剩下的5%的质能以普通或重子物质的形式存在。目前，只有十分之一的物质存在于像地球这样的恒星和行星中，其余的大部分以气体的形式存在于星系之间。暗物质和重子物质形成的结构被认为是在宇宙大爆炸的最初瞬间，由宇宙密度场中印记的量子涨落所播种的。它们在近乎均匀的原始等离子体中产生微弱的声波，在大爆炸遗留下来的热量上留下了可观察到的印记，这些热量是在宇宙只有40万年的时候发射出来的（现在可以看到宇宙微波背景）。这些微小的涟漪逐渐发展成为我们今天在宇宙中看到的丰富结构：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到宇宙结构网的转变，是我们提案的重点。我们的项目将前沿的理论研究与宇宙的早期阶段结合在一起，通过理论和观测项目来确定宇宙结构的形成和演化，并利用我们最新的观测结果来对抗我们的模型预测，同时利用达勒姆大学追求的仪器发展。我们将探索天体物理学线索，以确定暗物质的身份和暗能量的本质，重点关注星系的演化，回到宇宙最早的时代，以及它们的环境对它们性质的影响。我们将利用地面天文台和地球轨道卫星上的最新仪器，研究黑洞的形成和演化，以及它们在决定星系和更大尺度结构的结构和性质方面的作用。

Astronomy attracts the imagination of the public to an extent that only very few other branches of science can match - this is due, in large part, to the fundamental nature of the questions it addresses: the origin of the Universe and our place within it. Astronomy is immediately accessible to every human by simply gazing up into the night sky to look the Moon, the planets and stars. Since the dawn of civilisation this has provoked questions about the origins of the Earth, stars and our Solar System, as well as the origins of the Universe. Over the past thirty years we have seen the emergence of a standard model in cosmology describing the constituents of our Universe, as well as a plausible explanation 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 of the mass-energy is in the form of dark matter, most probably a new weakly interacting elementary particle yet to be detected on Earth (and hence of great interest to particle physicists). Only the remaining five percent of the mass-energy is in the form of ordinary, or baryonic, matter of which, at the present-day, only about a tenth is in stars and planets such as the Earth, and the rest resides mostly as gas in between galaxies. The structures formed by dark and baryonic matter are thought to have been 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 (now visible as the Cosmic Microwave Background). 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 pursued in Durham. We will explore astrophysical clues to the identity of the dark matter and the nature of the dark energy, 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.