Astronomy

We have international programmes of observational, theoretical, laboratory based and mission based astronomy research, focussing on all four of the key science questions of European astronomy and supported by STFC.

• Do we understand the extremes of the Universe?
• How do galaxies form and evolve?
• What is the origin and evolution of stars and planets?
• How do we fit in?

We also carry out research in the area of astronomy education.

Key facts

• Astronomy is a highly productive, and internationally excellent research area within the OU, producing typically over 150 research papers a year and financially supported by STFC, UKSA, the European Commission and other funding bodies.
• Research students in Astronomy at the OU have opportunities to travel to our own telescopes abroad, to international observatories and to international conferences.
• The OU Astronomers gather for a weekly Journal Club, which is an informal and informative gathering, discussing up to the minute developments in astronomy from the our own work, the journals and reports from international conferences.
• Astronomy is a priority area for OU-funded broadcasting. We regularly consult on BBC television series funded by the OU including Stargazing Live and Bang Goes The Theory.
• We also teach more Astronomy undergraduates than any other UK university, with over 40 years' experience specialising in distance education, taking students from no previous knowledge to undergraduate degrees and beyond.

Facilities

We have leading roles in many major international projects and facilities, including JWST programmes, LOFAR, JCMT Legacy Surveys, and the Vera C Rubin Observatory and LSST. We run the OpenScience Observatories, a collection of telescopes and other instruments at Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife.

We are members of the UK SALT Consortium, which owns a 5 per cent share in the 11-metre Southern African Large Telescope. We are a partner in the SuperWASP consortium that operates two robotic sky-patrol camera systems (one in La Palma, one at Sutherland Observatory, South Africa), We are co-investigators on the forthcoming ESA Euclid space telescope and have involvement with the forthcoming ESA PLATO and ARIEL and Athena space telescopes.

We use many international facilities, from ground-based observatories (e.g. ALMA, AAO, ESO) to space telescopes (JWST, HST, Spitzer, XMM-Newton), and are involved in the planning and preparation for future international facilities.

Observational studies are complemented by state-of-the-art laboratories in astrochemistry which are integrated with European and US astrochemistry and planetary science laboratory networks.

All this research exploits the University’s IMPACT computing cluster for data analysis and modelling.

More details about our work is given under the various astronomy sub-groupings listed on the right.