Research
Research Areas
From the radio whisper of cosmic dawn to the magnetic violence of the Sun — the questions CASSA's scientists pursue, and the people pursuing them.
The breadth of the work
Six areas, fourteen scientists, one centre
CASSA's science is carried out by its Core and Associate Members — astronomers, physicists and engineers based at IUB and at leading institutions across the world. Their work, published in journals from MNRAS and ApJ to Nature Astronomy, clusters into six research areas, from cosmology to the engineering of spaceflight. Each below names what every member actually does, with a key paper.
What we study
From cosmic dawn to the Sun's corona
Area 01 · 3 scientists
Cosmology & the Early Universe
How did the universe begin, what is it made of, and how fast is it expanding? CASSA attacks these questions from three directions at once — the cosmic web traced by millions of galaxies, the warped light of gravitationally lensed quasars, and the steady beat of exploding stars. Together they weigh dark energy, chart the growth of cosmic structure, and probe the stubborn tension between early- and late-Universe measurements of the expansion rate.
Area 02 · 4 scientists
Galaxies & Their Environments
Galaxies are not islands. CASSA studies how they assemble their stars and structure across cosmic time, and how the environments they live in — from the neutral intergalactic medium of the cosmic dawn to the hot, magnetised plasma of massive clusters — shape and quench their growth. The work runs from JWST snapshots of the infant Universe and billion-particle cosmological simulations to the diffuse radio glow of gas threading galaxy clusters.
Area 03 · 2 scientists
Black Holes, AGN & Accretion
At the hearts of galaxies and in stellar binaries, matter spiralling onto black holes powers the brightest engines in the cosmos. CASSA measures how black holes feed, grow, and launch relativistic jets across the full sweep of black-hole mass — from stellar-mass binaries flickering in our own Galaxy to the obscured supermassive giants that shaped galaxy evolution over billions of years.
Where physics meets engineering
From the birth of stars to the hardware of spaceflight
Area 04 · 3 scientists
Stars, Planets & the Sun
Why do stars have the masses they do, how are planets born in the disks around them, and how does our own star heat its atmosphere to millions of degrees? CASSA models the birth of stars and planetary systems with radiation-magnetohydrodynamics, and decodes the magnetic violence of the solar corona with space-based spectroscopy.
Area 05 · 1 scientist
Theoretical Physics
Underneath every observation lies physics — the mathematics of quantum fields and curved spacetime. CASSA's theoretical work probes the foundations of quantum field theory and gravitation, from the boundary 'edge' degrees of freedom that may account for a black hole's entropy to the deep structure of gauge theories that underpins the rest of the Center's science.
Area 06 · 1 scientist
Engineering
Space is an engineering problem as much as a scientific one. CASSA's engineering research designs the hardware that future missions depend on — from the materials and devices that generate power in orbit to the electronics that run an observatory. Blending computational electromagnetics, quantum-mechanical modelling and AI-driven design, the group engineers lightweight, radiation-hardened technologies built to survive the vacuum, radiation and thermal extremes of space — bridging fundamental physics with the practical demands of spaceflight.