Dr Andy Young

  • Dr Andy Young
    Associate Professor in Astrophysics

Biography

I received an MA in Maths and PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Cambridge after which I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Maryland and MIT before joining the School of Physics at the University of Bristol. I have served as Chair of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Group (2014-2017), School Education Director (2017-2023), and Council member of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024-). I am an Associate Professor in Astrophysics.

Research interests

"The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time" is a wonderful quote from the prologue of S. Chandrasekhar's book The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes. I am fascinated by black holes and the impact they have on their environments. While the black holes themselves might be "perfect" the astrophysics of the ionised plasma around them is a lot messier, and I am interested in the high-energy astrophysics of plasma that is inflowing (accreting), orbiting, and outflowing in the vicinity of the black hole. This is important because radiation and relativistic outflows from the accreting gas can profoundly affect how the host galaxy evolves. My group studies these systems with a combination of numerical computer simulations, X-ray and multi-wavelength observations, and I am starting to look at gravitational wave signatures of binary black hole systems. My X-ray observational work uses space-based observatories such as Chandra, XMM-Newton, NuSTAR, and XRISM.

I lead the Innermost accretion flow science work package of the Time-domain Analysis to study the Life-cycle and Evolution of Supermassive black holes (TALES) EU Doctoral Training Network.

Current researchers and PhD students

Former researchers and PhD students at Bristol