PhD studentship in Astronomy

PhD studentship in Astronomy PhD studentship in the Co-Evolution of Galaxies and Supermassive Black Holes Since Cosmic Noon with PRIMA (2026) A fully funded PhD studentship in Astronomy for 3.5 years - Entry for this studentship can be January 2027 or May 2027 What you get Fully-paid tuition fees for three and a half years. A tax-free bursary for living costs for three and a half years (£ 21,805 per annum in 2026/27). Additional financial support is provided to cover short-term and long-term travel. If you are not a UK national, nor an EU national with UK settled/pre-settled status, you will need to apply for a student study visa before admission. Type of award Postgraduate Research PhD project Star formation and black hole growth are perhaps the two most intriguing aspects of galaxy evolution. While galaxies and their central black holes operate on vastly different spatial scales, the Universe today shows a remarkable scaling relationship between galaxy stellar mass and central black hole mass. How did this come to be? Did they grow together, or via episodes where one is dominant and the other suppressed? The Probe far-infrared Mission for Astrophysics, PRIMA, will provide the first integrated census of star formation and black hole growth when galaxy evolution was most active, between ~ 9 billion and 3 billion years ago. PRIMA's far-IR spectrophotometry simultaneously measures black hole accretion rate, star formation rate, and outflows from massive star-forming galaxies to establish how they are linked. This simultaneous measurement is only possible in the mid- and far-infrared because dust obscures UV and optical radiation which is often used to track star formation, and gas obscures X-rays typically used to track black hole growth. PRIMA is being proposed as the first $1B NASA Astrophysics Probe-class mission. It would be launched in 2032. Prof. Seb Oliver is one of the 27 PRIMA co-investigators and leads the UK involvement in PRIMA, funded by the UK Space Agency. Critical to PRIMA’s success will be to employ the world-leading XID+ modelling methodology developed here at the University of Sussex in Oliver’s group to disentangle the emission from different galaxies. Your project will be to develop the XID+ modelling. The hyperspectral imaging and spectroscopy of PRIMA provide the keys to unlocking blended emission from multiple galaxies. You will extend XID+ to fully exploit this new information. You will test your methods on state-of-the-art galaxy evolution simulations. You will design the experiments that can be done with PRIMA and how they will be able to answer these fundamental questions. While the focus is preparing for PRIMA, your PhD will also be exploiting the latest data sets from the best observatories including JWST, Euclid and Alma.  By applying XID+ to combine these novel data sets with the best current FIR and sub-mm data from e.g. Herschel and SCUBA-2  you will be able to explore the limits of our understanding of these sc