Simon Murphy

Welcome! I am an astronomer in the School of Science at the University of New South Wales Canberra.

My research interests are focused on identifying and characterising some of the youngest stars in the Solar neighbourhood. These young, nearby star systems are ideal laboratories for understanding early stellar evolution and probing the diverse conditions under which stars and, importantly, planets form.

To accomplish this I use observations from a variety of telescopes and satellites, including the latest all-sky surveys here in Australia. I am also interested in the international Virtual Observatory effort, which is developing standards for the discovery, exchange and analysis of astronomical data by computers and astronomers alike.

From 2016 to 2020 I was a Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UNSW Canberra, following a two year Gliese Fellowship at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. I completed my Ph.D. at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory in 2012.

…for a more technical description of my work, see my research page.


Latest Publications

High resolution spectroscopic follow-up of the most metal-poor candidates from SkyMapper DR1.1
Yong, D. et al., including Murphy, S. J., 2021, Accepted for publication in MNRAS.
arXiv: 2107.06430
r-Process elements from magnetorotational hypernovae
Yong, D. et al., including Murphy, S. J., 2021, Nature, 595, 223.
arXiv: 2107.03010
Exploring the Galaxy's halo and very metal-weak thick disc with SkyMapper and Gaia DR2
Cordoni, G. et al., including Murphy, S. J., 2021, MNRAS, 503(2), 2539.
arXiv: 2011.01189
THOR 42: A touchstone 24 Myr-old eclipsing binary spanning the fully convective boundary
Murphy, S. J., Lawson, W. A., Onken, C. A., Yong, D., Da Costa, G. S., Zhou, G., Mamajek, E. E., Bell, C. P. M., Bessell, M. S. & Feinstein, A. D., 2020, MNRAS, 491(4), 4902.
arXiv: 1911.05925
Sporadic and intense accretion in a 1 Myr-old brown dwarf candidate
Nguyen-Thanh, D., Phan-Bao, N., Murphy, S. J. & Bessell, M. S., 2020, A&A, 634, A128.
arXiv: 2001.08890
2MASS J15460752-6258042: a mid-M dwarf hosting a prolonged accretion disc
Lee, J., Song, I. & Murphy, S. J., 2020, MNRAS, 494(1), 62.
arXiv: 2002.12600

…more on my publications page.



Background image credit: Akira Fujii.
I acknowledge that I live and work on the land of the Ngunnawal people, and pay my respects to their Elders, both past and present.