A fully funded PhD scholarship is available to work with Dr Yvette Perrott at Victoria University of Wellington on research into the intracluster medium of galaxy clusters. The use of galaxy clusters as precision cosmological probes is currently limited by our poor understanding of how the easily-observable gas component relates to the dark-matter-dominated total mass.
This observational and simulation-based project will involve investigating flexible yet robust methods for extracting cluster gas pressure profiles from Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect data using current and next-generation instruments and investigating ways of modelling non-thermal pressure and its connection to synchrotron radio emission.