Dr Katy Lancaster

Research interests

Katy Lancaster is a postdoc in the Astrophysics group, working with Mark Birkinshaw. Her main research interest is clusters of galaxies, the largest known gravitationally bound structures in the Universe, which provide us with cosmic laboratories for the study of cosmological parameters. Dr Lancaster observes these objects using the Sunyaev Zel'dovich Effect (SZE), which is the scattering of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB - a relic from the big bang) by the hot cluster gas. As such, clusters appear as shadows in the microwave sky. Dr Lancaster is involved with a number of SZE experiments, mainly the OCRA receiver on the Torun telescope (Poland) and the AMiBA interferometer run by the University of Taipei (Hawaii), and is also pursuing an interest in the X-ray properties of clusters through analysis of data from the Chandra and XMM satellites.

The picture shows the galaxy cluster Abell 1795 observed via the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect using the Very Small Array (Tenerife). The dark object at the centre is the cluster. The other features are fluctuations in the CMB originating from the formation of the early Universe.