Chris Evans

Head of Science & UK ELT Programme Lead

UK Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh

Part of the Science & Technology Facilities Council


I'm leading the UK's development programme for instrumentation for the Extremely Large Telescope, now under construction by ESO. My research is primarily concerned with the evolution of massive stars, with wider interest in stellar clusters, the Magellanic Clouds and other Local Group galaxies. In the increasingly distant past I was a postdoc at the ING in La Palma (2002-2005), and before that a student/postdoc at UCL.

  • PI of the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey [Paper I]

         • RSGs in 30 Dor: Physical properties / Constraints on binarity

         • Gaia DR2 reveals a very massive runaway star ejected from R136

         • Star-formation history of 30 Dor

         • An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst

  • Selected ELT work:

         • MOSAIC Project Scientist: SPIE 2018 paper

         • The Science Case for Multi-Object Spectroscopy on the E-ELT - White Paper, Jan. 2015

         • Potential of J-band stellar spectroscopy with ELTs

         • AO performances in cosmological deep fields

  • Selected other projects as co-I:

         • Future UV: US Decadal; ESA Voyage2050: 1908.04687 / 1908.05951 / 1911.00769

         • CUBES:Revisiting the science case for near-UV spectroscopy with the VLT

         • HARMONI: First-light integral-field spectrograph for the E-ELT

         • MOONS: A new near-IR MOS for ESO's VLT


    I'm a Visiting Professor at UoE's Institute for Astronomy

    Past PhD students:

  • Dr Lee Patrick: NGC 6822 abundances / RSGs in NGC 2100 / NGC 55 metallicity
  • Dr Vincent Hénault-Brunet:SMC HMXB / R136 rotation / R136 dispersion
  • Dr William Taylor: R139 letter / Sher 25
  • Dr Michael Campbell: MAD R136


    • Publications / Links / Twitter

    UK ATC, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh, EH9 3HJ, UK
    Telephone: +44-131-668-8364

      

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