Astronomical research in the Astrophysics and Space Research group covers a wide range of topics: solar physics, galactic and extragalactic studies, and the study of gravity and gravitational waves. Approaches include observations at X-ray to radio wavelengths, sophisticated data analysis techniques, numerical modelling and fundamental physics. A theme running through much of our work is the study of hot plasmas and high energy phenomena in a variety of astronomical contexts.

Further details for each of the main research areas are given below.

Extragalactic Astrophysics	Extrasolar planets
Gravitational Astrophysics	Massive Stars
Solar Physics	Innovative Algorithms for Astrophysics

The Group also jointly hosts an annual Extragalactic Workshop with the Nottingham Astronomy Group. The Extragalactic Workshops typically involve ~50 participants, in 2011 this will be held in the School of Physics & Astronomy at Nottingham University.

Each workshop has an overall theme. The 2011 workshop will focus on Dark Matter in clusters, groups and galaxies

For information on the 2011 workshop see the extragalactic workshop 2011 page, which also has links to previous workshops in the series.

The Birmingham Extragalactic Group is performing detailed analysis of observations made by XMM-Newton, as part of a multi wavelength study of cosmic structures. Further information specific to our XMM analysis activities can be found here.

This section briefly describes the software development done here at Birmingham.Copies of most of this software are maintained on our FTP node.

ASTERIX A package for the reduction and analysis of X-ray data	ISYS A GUI interface/extension for ASTERIX
HI-SCALE Ulysses/HI-SCALE Display System The main data display software of the HI-SCALE instrument on Ulysses