** NEWS 25 Jan 2012: Using the APEX telescope in the Atacama desert, astronomers at Durham and Dartmouth have revealed the wild lives of today's biggest galaxies. ESO Press release **

2010 marked the 35th anniversary of the renaissance of observational astronomy and cosmology in the Department of Physics at Durham University. The Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology Group has grown substantially over this period and we are now one of the largest astronomy groups in the UK and Europe, hosting world-class activities in observational and theoretical extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, encompassing the formation and evolution of galaxies, clusters and large scale structure. Together these provide a rich research environment where productivity is significantly enhanced by the ease of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Durham ranked Number One in Europe and fourth in the world for our research into Space Science (which covers research into astronomy and astrophysics) over the decade 1998-2008, according to a recent league table by Thomson Reuters ESI and published in the Times.

Postgraduate Research Opportunities We are seeking graduate students to undertake research within our PhD and MSc programmes. We expect to take on 6 STFC-funded students for a PhD degree in addition to further students either self funded or with funding from different sources; the STFC-funded PhD studentships cover course fees and living expenses for 3.5 years. Students will undertake full-time (or part time) cutting edge astronomical research and instrumentation.Applicants are required to have, or expected to gain, at least a 2.1 undergraduate degree in physics, astrophysics or mathematics. More details on the available research programmes, application procedure, and eligibilty can be obtained from here.

Our observational research programmes makes extensive use of the world's forefront observational facilities to test advanced theoretical models of galaxy and structure formation developed in Durham. We utilise the largest ground-based optical and near-infrared telescopes including those in Hawaii, Australia, Chile and the Canary Islands, and we have been particularly successful at obtaining time on the Hubble Space Telescope. The multi-wavelength aspects of our programme focus on sub-millimeter and radio observations from ground-based facilities in Hawaii, Spain, Australia and the Americas and X-ray observations from space-based facilities such as the Chandra and Newton X-ray satellites (and NuSTAR from 2012). Follow the Research Topics link to find out more about our research.

Our theoretical research programme is centred around the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC). There you will find details of our studies into galaxy formation, large-scale structure and the nature of the cosmic dark matter. A key component of our research explores mass accretion onto black holes and is outlined both here (see Research Topics link on the left hand panel) and on our high-energy astrophysics web pages. We also closely interact with staff in the Astronomical Instrumentation group to aid the development and commissioning of instrumentation purpose-built for studies relevant to this area.

The Extragalactic & Cosmology Group is just one part of the Astronomy & Astrophysics research at Durham.