PhD in Closely Related Disciplines

Award summary 100% home tuition fees covered, and a minimum tax-free annual living allowance of £20,780 (2025/26 UKRI rate). Funds are also available for travel and other research expenses. Overview Material falling onto a black hole glows brightly in X-rays, lighting up the vicinity of the event horizon. This process happens for black holes in our Galaxy that are in a close binary system with a normal star. Measuring the mass of these black holes informs on their formation mechanism, but traditional optical techniques are not accessible for ~2/3 of the known systems due to obscuration. This PhD project will focus on making pioneering mass measurements of black holes using the X-ray signal, for which obscuration is not a problem. The technique we will use is X-ray reverberation mapping – exploiting the echo that is created when X-rays from close to the black hole reflect off the accreting material on their way to our telescope. There will be scope for both observational and theoretical work, as we develop ever more sophisticated reverberation mapping models that account for general relativistic and radiative transfer effects, and apply them to state-of-the-art data from observatories such as the NASA missions NICER, NuSTAR and IXPE. Number of awards: 1 Start date: 1 st October 2026 Award duration: 4 years Sponsor: European Research Council (Consolidator Grant project X-MAPS)