Research

The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope is mapping two billion stars in our Milky Way, which includes their positions, motions, brightnesses, colours and variability. My day-to-day research uses sophisticated analysis of this massive dataset to discover fast moving stars, stellar pairs and disrupting satellite galaxies.

A hypervelocity star is one which is travelling fast enough to escape from the Galaxy. These stars can tell us about the extreme astrophysical events that accelerated them, from stellar collisions and encounters with supermassive black holes, to supernovae and the disruption of dwarf galaxies. I specialise in finding these rare objects among the billions of stars in modern datasets.

The Sun is not a typical star, because most stars have a stellar companion. These binary stars orbit each other and can interact, which leads to exotic astrophysical process: gravitational waves, supernovae, and gamma ray bursts. I study binary stars by hunting for the runaway former companions of stars that have exploded and by identifying them in large datasets.