Higher Degree by Research Application Portal

Where we grow up and live strongly impacts who we are. For example, the long-term city socialite may have a very different personality to the isolated island hermit. The same is true for galaxies. 

A galaxy's location within the cosmic web can significantly impact how it evolves with time, shaping its visual appearance, rate of growth and even causing it to eventually stop forming stars and die. While these correlations between location and galaxy properties have been extensively mapped out in the local Universe, their causation at earlier times is far from clear. Theory predicts that these changes likely occur due to the gravitational interactions between galaxies in over-dense environments (and increased mergers in group-scale environments). However, the observational evidence for these processes occurring over Universal timescales is lacking. If we wish to fully parametrise the impact of environment on the properties of galaxies, we must track the co-evolution of galaxies and their environment over a large evolutionary baseline, and aim to identify the astrophysical processes that are driving evolutionary changes - ultimately resulting in the correlations we see today.

 The successful candidate(s) will work on projects exploring the co-evolution of galaxy properties and environment (traced by the Dark Matter distribution) using data from large galaxy evolution surveys such as the Deep Extragalactic VIsible Legacy Survey (DEVILS) and Galaxy and Mass Assembly Survey (GAMA), combined with high resolution imaging data from Hubble Space Telescope, James Webb Space Telescope and Euclid Space Telescope, and advanced software tools such as ProFuse. These results will also be compared to simulated observations from state-of-the-art numerical simulations. This project will also pave the way for future studies combining the Wide Area VISTA Extragalactic Survey (WAVES) on 4MOST with data from upcoming space-based facilities.

luke.j.davies@uwa.edu.au 

The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) is a program of independent, supervised research that is assessed solely on the basis of a thesis, sometimes including a creative work component, that is examined externally. The work presented for a PhD must be a substantial and original contribution to scholarship, demonstrating mastery of the subject of interest as well as an advance in that field of knowledge. 

Visit the course webpage for full details of this course including admission requirements, course rules and the relevant CRICOS code/s.