Institute of Astronomy

Surveys

Fifth Gaia-ESO Data Release: the Catalogue with the Astrophysical Parameters for ~115,000 Stars

Published on 24/05/2022 

ESO has now released the very major results from the Gaia-ESO survey. This 10+-year effort has been co-led by Cambridge (Gerry Gilmore) and Arcetri (Sofia Randich), with substantial support from a dedicated IoA team and CASU. The Cambridge Project Office included Clare Worley, Anna Hourihane and Anais Gonneau, with additional support in IoA over the years from Jim Lewis, Sergey Kosopov, Mike Irwin, Eduardo Gonzalez Solares, Maria Bergemann, Andy Casey, Keith Hawkins, Karin Lind, Paula Jofre, Thomas Masseron, George Kordopatis, and David Murphy.

Dark Energy Survey completes six-year mission

Published on 08/01/2019 

After scanning in depth about a quarter of the southern skies for six years and cataloguing hundreds of millions of distant galaxies, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) will finish taking data on January 9 2019.

Gaia mission releases 3D census of over 1 billion stars

Published on 24/04/2018 

The European Space Agency's Gaia mission has released its second batch of data. This release includes information on 1.7 billion objects (including stars, galaxies, quasars, and asteroids). This dataset covers a volume of space 1000 times greater than the previous Gaia release, with a hundredfold improvement in precision. This data will benefit almost all branches of astronomy, shedding light on the formation of our Solar System, the evolution of stars, the history of the Milky Way, the distribution of dark matter, and the calibration the Universe's distance scale.

Variable Universe

Variable stars, RR Lyrae, transients, supernovae, microlensing events.

Gaia: a Stereoscopic Census of our Galaxy

Gaia is the ESA cornerstone mission set to revolutionise our understanding of the Milky Way.

Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational lensing is used to determine the masses of lensing galaxies and clusters and to study more distant galaxies that can be magnified by a factor of more than 20.

Quasars and active galaxies

Quasars are the most luminous objects in the Universe and powered by accreting supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies.

Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit

CASU is involved in survey astronomy with expertise covering ground- and space-based projects ranging from data processing and image analysis techniques through to data curation and access to UK facility data archives.

CASSOWARY

Typically, the target systems correspond to lensing of z > 0.5 star-forming galaxies by luminous red galaxies and brightest cluster galaxies.