The sub-Department of Astrophysics has recieved generous donations from the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation to set up the Hintze Centre for Astrophysical Surveys. The Centre was founded by Professor Roger Davies and now led by Professor Stephen Smartt as Director. The aim is to establish a key role in addressing the major problems of modern physics and astrophysics by augmenting our participation in the major international surveys that are designed to address them.
The Centre runs a series of public Hintze Lectures, along with colloquia and seminars.
The Hintze Centre has ongoing participation in wide-field optical and near-infrared imaging surveys such as the VISTA surveys, the SDSS surveys, alongside radio surveys work involving LOFAR, JVLA, MeerKAT and ASKAP on the pathway to the SKA.
Prof Smartt and Dr Maria Vincenzi, lead time domain surveys of the sky with the ATLAS survey (a global all-sky network of 5 telescopes), the Pan-STARRS surveys (now two telescopes) and the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We play a leading role in the UK's participation in the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. and in the Euclid mission. We are scientific leads in the UK's broker project - Lasair, which used the Zwicky Transient facility as a prototype and is now involved in the commissioning and early alerts from LSST.
Our teams are involved in ESO's spectroscopic surveys with the multi-fibre 4MOST and with integral field spectroscopy surveys (with VLT-KMOS, AAO-SAMI and HETDEX). We are part of the SOXS GTO team and have played leadership roles in ENGRAVE - the ESO community programme for electromagnetic counterparts of gravitational wave sources. The centre is pursuing three strands of research, detailed below.
The Dark Universe
Led by Professor Matt Jarvis, Dr Maria Vincenzi, Hintze Fellow Dr Imogen Whittam . Hintze Scholar Madalina Tudorache completed her DPhil in 2025.
We only know what ~4% of the Universe is made of! We are at the forefront of some of the largest projects that will be used to tackle this problem into the next decade. Using wide and deep surveys at optical, near-infrared and radio wavelengths (VIDEO, JVLA, HST-CANDELS, LSST, Euclid, SKA) we can trace the large scale structure of the Universe and begin to determine the equation of state of Dark Energy, how the visible matter traces the Dark Matter, and to investigate whether Genera Relativity works on the largest cosmological scales. Our supernova team (led by Dr Maria Vincenzi) and galaxy experts (Professor Matt Jarvis) work together on the use of type Ia supernova as probes of cosmology and determining what role their host galaxies play.
Galaxy Evolution
Led by Professor Martin Bureau, Professor Roger Davies and Dr Chiara Spiniello, with Hintze Fellow Dr Adriano Poci, and Hintze Scholar Melika Gorgianeh.
Our research is aimed at understanding the assembly and evolution of galaxies, as a function of environment and mass, from the earliest times until the present day. We study nearby galaxies using surveys such as MaNGA and SAMI to make detailed models of their luminous and dark components. The deepest surveys from space- and ground-based facilities (e.g. VLT-KMOS, HST) are used to measure the properties of galaxies 5-10 billion years ago when star formation was at its peak, and the first clusters of galaxies were forming.
The Transient Universe
Led by Professor Stephen Smartt , Dr Maria Vincenzi, Professor Rob Fender along with Hintze Fellow Dr Alex Cooper and Hintze Scholar Shruti Ramaiya.
Many of the new surveys at all wavelengths are pushing new frontiers in time-domain astronomy, with facilities capable of surveying vast sky areas to relatively deep levels on second timescales. Our group studies the statistics and the astrophysics of transients, and carries out detailed simulations of these events. We work with optical and near-infrared surveys, and with our ATLAS collaboration we can survey the whole sky every night from both the northern and southern hemispheres. With the Dark Energy Survey and the low redshift supernova sample from ATLAS we work on constraining cosmological models and the nature of dark enegy.
We use the twin Pan-STARRS telescopes to search for the counterparts of gravitational waves and kilonovae, and play a leading role in the ENGRAVE Large Programme at ESO for follow-up. Our team is building toward the excitement of the Rubin Observatory and LSST. We take advantage of key projects in radio time-domain astronomy such as LOFAR Transients, MeerKAT-MeerLICHT, and SKA.