Pulsars are enigmatic neutron stars which have defied efforts to understand them for over 40 years. POREC (Pulsar Optical Reverse Engineering Code) was first written to constrain pulsar emission theories through constraining ...

This thesis focuses on shells ejected during classical nova events. Novae are due to thermonuclear runaway on the surface of a white dwarf in a binary system. The work herein concentrates on nova shells individually to ...

The study of star formation bridges many vastly disparate scales. From the small, nearby, quiescent cores of low mass star formation, to the highly turbulent conditions in which the most massive stars form, to the extreme ...

Optical polarization is a powerful diagnostic tool in astrophysics, allowing the investigation of asymmetries in source regions of astronomical objects, magnetic field configurations, and magnetic field strengths. Polarized ...

It has been suggested that globular star clusters may host a black hole with intermediate mass (~ a few × 1000 M_sun ) or a collection of low mass (~ 10 M_sun ) black holes at their centre. High velocity dispersion in the ...

This thesis presents an investigation into the galactic population of planetary nebulae (PNe) whose progenitors have evolved through the engulfment of massive planets during the asymptotic giant branch (AGB) phase of their ...

This thesis investigates the comparative performance of multicore CPU and general purpose GPU on a commodity desktop computer. To investigate this, an image deconvolution software package (IMPAIR) was updated from its ...

In this thesis, studies of the kinematic properties for a sample of Galactic bipolar planetary nebulae, based on optical and infrared observations, were performed us- ing a morpho–kinematic code, optical and NIR diagnostic ...

This work started in September, 2014 and initially started as an investigation of the characterisation issues associated with using Electron Multiplying Charge- Coupled Devices (EMCCDs) in a two beam polarimeter. It was ...

This thesis outlines the findings of a multi-wavelength and polarimetric study of a number of rotation-powered pulsars. Polarisation studies of pulsars are just one example of obtaining insight into the geometry of their ...