Manasvee Saraf

PhD Student

University of Western Australia

Biography

Hello! I am Manasvee Saraf, a PhD student, jointly-funded by ICRAR-UWA and CSIRO. My research is supervised by Ivy Wong and Luca Cortese. In 2020, I graduated from University College London with a Master in Science, Astrophysics degree. My Masters project was to construct the luminosity function of over a million galaxies from the KiDS galactic survey. I also have research experience in the fields of planetary science and stellar astrophysics, working on making and analysing photometric and spectrographic observations. The aim of my PhD is to address how galaxy formation and evolution are affected by a galaxy's local and global environment. To do this, I am analysing the atomic hydrogen (HI) spatial and spectral properties of galaxies in the Norma Cluster. I intend to constrain how galaxy properties change as a function of position within one of the most massive structures in the local Universe, what is the dominance and co-evolution of different HI stripping mechanisms and out to which distance from Norma does its environment perturb the gas cycle of galaxies. To date, I have investigated the HI properties and evolution of Norma's central bright cluster galaxy using mosaicked observations from the ATCA. I am currently working with the ASKAP spectral line commissioning team to process the pilot ASKAP WALLABY observations of the Norma cluster. I hope to eventually work with data from the full WALLABY survey.