Jeremy Sanders

"I have always been interested in trying to understand how things worked"

Life
My name is Jeremy Sanders and I am an astrophysicist/astronomer at MPE. I‘m originally from the UK. When I was very young I lived in Wales, but moved later to the county of Herefordshire, which lies in England close to the Welsh border. I was previously a student and postdoc at the Institute of Astronomy in the University of Cambridge, UK.

I have always been interested in trying to understand how things worked. For example, I once took a radio apart when I was child. I originally became interested in astronomy because of the dark skies near where I lived in the countryside, and through the encouragement of my physics teacher who suggested I take photographs of the moon and night sky. I then became very interested in reading about the subject, bought a telescope and studied science at school.

Science
I‘m interested in clusters of galaxies, particularly as viewed using X-rays. X-rays are a really powerful way to look at clusters, as the majority of the normal matter in the cluster, which is in the form of a hot plasma [could say gas informally], emits X-rays. My main research topic is looking at the interaction between the supermassive black holes which lie at the centre of clusters and the surrounding hot plasma.

Additionally, I‘m interested in developing new ways to analyse data, in particular visualising it. I‘ve been developing filtering techniques to enhance edges in X-ray data and other methods to reveal structure. I have also developed various methods in order to map out the physical properties of the gas within galaxy clusters.

Hobbys
In my spare time I am interested in computer programming (I have written freely-available graphing software), electronics and reading. When I can, I visit my family who now live on the Isle of Man (which lies between England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and have a dairy farm.