Research

Students at Curtin receive a firm grounding in research methods and techniques, and senior students are expected to complete a research project under the supervision of a specialist in the field of Astronomy. Curtin offers a wide variety of research projects at undergraduate, Honours, Masters and PhD level.

Current Projects

Research projects are available at all levels from undergraduate to PhD. The projects currently being undertaken by students at Curtin are:

Masters:

Testing a potential new site for an optical telescope at Mt Bruce, Western Australia (Claire Hotan)

PhD:

Radio transient sources associated with Gamma-ray Bursts and X-ray binaries (Aquib Moin)

Distributed Computing Projects

CIRA Nereus-V Server

The Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA) is now participating in the Oxford-based Nereus-V distributed computing project. You can donate spare CPU cycles to astrophysics-related processing tasks like pulsar searching, using a simple java-based client. We have established a local server that handles the distribution of processing tasks. If you would like to help, please navigate to:

http://nereus.cira.curtin.edu.au

and click on the big, friendly link in the middle.

One word of warning: the client does quite a lot of downloading, so it is not recommended to run this from home or anywhere that imposes a severe download limit. Staff on the Curtin network may want to watch their monthly allocation for the first few days and make sure it does not get used up too quickly. Anyone on the iVEC network will be fine.

If you would like more information about the project and the client software (including instructions for running it in foreground mode so that you can keep watch), please go to the CIRA wiki and follow the ‘CIRA Nereus-V Server’ link under ‘CIRA Research Programs’.