Every star we see at night is a potential planetary system, and astronomers at Keele University are tracking the telltale dimming of starlight when planets cross in front of their suns. This research tackles a fundamental gap in our understanding: how do galaxies, stars, and planets actually form and evolve, and how are these processes connected? The team will use the world’s most powerful ground-based and space telescopes to build a catalogue of exoplanets discovered by the transit method, then study their atmospheres and compositions in detail. They will also investigate how stars forge heavy elements and return them to space, and how supermassive black holes at galaxy centres influence star formation. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. It addresses the deepest questions about our cosmic origins—where the atoms in our bodies came from, how our Solar System formed, and whether other planetary systems resemble our own. Past fundamental research in astrophysics has unexpectedly yielded technologies such as CCD sensors (now in every smartphone camera) and satellite navigation corrections based on general relativity. A clearer picture of planetary formation could, in the long term, sharpen our understanding of Earth’s own history and its place in the galaxy.
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We live on a planet. To understand our home, and where our home came from, we need to understand the formation of planets around other stars. To do that we first need to find them, and we can do that best by watching for the dips in the light of a star when a planet passes in front of it. By building up a catalogue of such transits we can find planets to study in detail with the leading astronomical telescopes, both on the ground and in space; seeing what other planets are like will help us understand how they formed, and hence how our solar system formed. But planets form around stars, and the stuff we ourselves are made of was itself made in stars. To understand the origin of planets, and the origin of the star-stuff of which we are made, we need to understand how stars interact with the clouds of interstellar material from which they originate, and how they burn that material into heavier elements, and how they then return that material to the galaxy, to form a new generation of stars and planets (and possibly life-forms). But stars form in galaxies, and to understand star formation we need to understand how galaxies form and evolve, and how the stuff galaxies are made of breaks up into stars, and what effect the stars then have on the evolution of galaxies, and how this is affected by the super-massive black holes that form and grow in the centres of galaxies. By using the latest ground-based and space-based observatories to study planets, stars and galaxies we can better understand the whole process of their formation and evolution, emphasizing how every link of this chain is interconnected, and so improve our understanding of our own deep origins and our own place in the universe.
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