Lucas Glover

I am a full-time PhD candidate in astrophysics at the School of Physics, UNSW Sydney. I completed a Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours) at UNSW, majoring in Physics and minoring in Mathematics, with Honours in Physics. My research interests are in Galactic archaeology, particularly stellar streams and the assembly history of the Milky Way.

Project: Galactic Archaeology with Stellar Streams

Supervised by: A/Prof Sarah Martell

Project description:  My PhD research investigates how reliably the properties of disrupted dwarf galaxies can be recovered from stellar streams using data from large spectroscopic surveys. I am using the Ananke synthetic stellar surveys, constructed from the Feedback In Realistic Environments (FIRE) cosmological simulations, to create mock catalogues representative of the 4-metre Multi Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST) Milky Way Halo Low-Resolution Survey. By varying the observational data quality, completeness, and target-selection effects in these catalogues, I aim to determine how these limitations affect our ability to identify stellar streams and recover the properties of their progenitor galaxies. Because the true properties of the simulated stars and their progenitors are known, these synthetic surveys provide a controlled environment in which to test how reliably progenitor properties can be recovered under realistic 4MOST observational conditions.