Staff Profile

About Me

Dominic was born in the United Kingdom and holds both British and Irish citizenship. He completed his MSci Physics and Astrophysics degree at the University of Birmingham (Sept 2009 - July 2013), and obtained his PhD in astronomy from the Jeremiah Horrocks Institute of the University of Central Lancashire (Oct 2013 - Nov 2016), which was funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). In February 2017, he moved to Leuven in Belgium to become a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Conny Aerts at the Institute of Astronomy, KU Leuven, Belgium (Feb 2017 - Oct 2020). In Novemeber 2020 he obtained a competitive FWO senior postdoctoral research fellowship also based at KU Leuven (Nov 2020 - Aug 2023). Since September 2023, Dominic holds a Readership Faculty position in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University in the UK.

Research Network

I am a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (FRAS), a Member of the Institute of Physics (MInstP), a member of the European Astronomical Society (EAS) and a junior member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). These professional organisations allow me to network with other researchers in physics and astronomy. They also organise scientific meetings, training and mentoring workshops, which I have attended to improve my communication, outreach and career prospects, and pass my knowledge and experience onto others.

I currently hold leading roles in several international consortia focussed on various astrophysical aspects of massive stars, including:

• MOBSTER: Detection, characterisation and understanding of magnetic fields in early-type stars
• CubeSpec: in-orbit proof-of-concept for spectroscopy with a cubesat and facilitating massive star asteroseismology from spectroscopic line profile variability
• XShootU: UV, visible and infrared spectroscopy of massive stars at low metallicity
• BEST: coordination of the BRITE-Constellation network of cubesats assembling time-series photometry of bright stars
• Arago: candidate mission for M7 ESA call; chair of the 'Hot BA star' working group

Asteroseismology

Asteroseismology is the study of oscillations inside stars, which telescopes capture as changes in their surface brightness. The detection of stellar oscillation frequencies allows us to probe the physics of stellar structure and evolution, with the ultimate goal of asteroseismology being to improve our understanding of the interior physical conditions and processes for a diverse range of stars. The quality of space observations, such as from the CoRoT, Kepler/K2 and TESS space telescopes, provide an excellent opportunity to study physics that is not currently well understood for massive stars.

My current UKRI Frontier Research Grant, SYMPHONY, focuses on asteroseismology of massive stars and in particular blue supergiants, which are those that will eventually explode as violent supernovae and leave behind a neutron star or black hole. The project is using existing and developing new techniques for applying asteroseismology and determining the physical properties of massive stars, such as their interior rotation profiles, (core) masses and ages. These properties are not accurately known for massive stars, because our best current theoretical models contain large uncertainties. Massive stars pulsate in gravity and pressure mode oscillations which probe the deep stellar interiors and radiative envelopes, respectively, thus provide excellent insight of the physics at work within stellar interiors. The ongoing TESS mission is targeting thousands of massive stars thanks to my several TESS GI proposals as PI spanning cycles 1-6. In addition to these new TESS data, the SYMPHONY project is exploiting high-resolution spectroscopy from ESO and Mercator telescopes, and the KU Leuven CubeSpec mission. Read more at the SYMPHONY project website.

Current vacancy: Fixed-term (3+1 years) postdoctoral research associate in stellar astrophysics with a focus on spectroscopy and asteroseismology of blue supergiants. Application deadline of 5 Jan 2024 and negotiable start date of 1 May 2024.

Read more about massive star asteroseismology:

• Bowman (2020, Fron. Space Sci. Astron., 7, 70), 'Asteroseismology of high-mass stars: new insights of stellar interiors with space telescopes'
• Burssens, Bowman, et al. (2023, Nature Astronomy 7, 913-930), 'A calibration point for stellar evolution from massive star asteroseismology'

Academic year (2023-2024)

• Physics BSc individual projects (PHY3027 & 3034)
• Physics group projects (PHY3025)
• Physics extended MPhys project (PHY8054)