Andy Taylor

Professor of Astrophysics

Institute for Astronomy,

University of Edinburgh,

Royal Observatory,

Blackford Hill,

Edinburgh,

EH9 3HJ,

Welcome to my webpage. I am Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. I'm also the Coordinator of the Marie Curie European Community Research Training Network, DUEL, and the Coordinator for the undergraduate Astrophysics Senior Honours and MPhys courses in the School of Physics at the University of Edinburgh. Below is some information on my lecture courses and research interests.

Undergraduate Teaching:

Astrophysics Senior Honours and MPhys:

Senior Honours & Integrated Masters:

Astrophysics Senior Honours Project Allocations

Astrophysical Cosmology

Radiation and Matter

The DUEL (Dark Universe with Extragalactic Lensing) Network:

I am Coordinator of the European DUEL Network studying Gravitational Lensing. The DUEL network is a Marie Curie European Community Research Training Network, composed of researchers in Gravitational Lensing at Astronomy Institutes in Edinburgh (IfA), Leiden, Paris (IAP), Naples (OAC), Heidelberg (ITA), Bonn (AIfA), Munich (USM) and British Columbia in Canada. The Network started in January 2007 and will run for 4 years. Its aims are to exploit large-scale imaging and multi-wavelength galaxy surveys such as the CFHTLS, Pan-STARRS and the VST-KIDS, and prepare for future gravitational lensing surveys such as DUNE. More details can be found here.

Research interests:

My main research interest is Theoretical and Observational Cosmology, in particular studying Dark Matter and Dark Energy with Gravitational Lensing, the nature of the Dark Energy, the analysis of Large-Scale Structure in Galaxy Redshift Surveys, the temperature and polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and the Early Universe and Cosmological Inflation.

Probing Dark Matter & Dark Energy with Gravitational Lensing

Gravitational Lensing is the distortion of distant images by foreground matter bending spacetime. This causes the distortion of galaxy images around massive galaxy clusters:

which we can use to make an image of the 3-dimensional distribution of the Dark Matter in the universe like this image from the COMBO-17 survey:

The Cosmic Microwave Background Temperature and Polarization

The Cosmic Microwave Background is the relic radiation from the hot phase of the Early Universe. The small variations in this radiation are now being mapped in great detail by the WMAP survey:

In addition the Cosmic Microwave Background is polarized. This polarized light contains important information about the very Early Universe, including the signature of Cosmological Inflation. The QUaD survey aims to study this in detail in the next few years.