AsPr Chris Lidman

Time domain astronomy, in particular exotic transierns, observational cosmology, and telescope operations.

Chris is currently the Director of Siding Spring Observatory

After completing his PhD at the ANU in 1994, Chris joined the European Southern Observatory (ESO) as an ESO Fellow. In the first year of the Fellowship, he joined the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), a project that he continues to be part of today. His role in the SCP at that time was to run the spectroscopic follow-up program at ESO facilities. The work done by the SCP led to the discovery (together with the Supernova High-z Team) of the accelerating universe. The discovery was recognised with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Soon after joining ESO, he was given the responsibility of managing the near-infrared instruments on the 2.2-metre ESO-MPE telescope at the La Silla Observatory.  He became a staff astronomer in 1997 and was part of the team that refurbished the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT), with the specific job of commissioning the new near-infrared imager and spectrograph on the NTT (SoFI). In addition to commissioning the instrument, he helped to develop the data reduction pipeline. In 1998, he used the new instrument to obtain the long sought-after redshift of the gravitational lens PKS 1830-211. In that same year, he was invovled in obtaining the first spectrum of SN 1998bw, the first supernova associated with a long-duration gamma-ray burst.

In 1998, he moved to the ESO Paranal Observatory and became part of the team that commissioned the first instruments on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). During that time, he helped develop queue mode observing at ESO and the protocols for rapid follow-up of transient sources – commonly referred to as Target of Opportunity (ToO) observations. 

In 1999, he led an ESO Large Program to better constrain the properties of Dark Energy. In 2000, he joined the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS). His role in the SNLS was to manage the SNLS observing program on the ESO VLT. 

In 2001, he was promoted to Associate Astronomer, and in 2004 he was promoted to Full Astronomer. During that time and up until 2009, he led the adaptive optics (AO) group at ESO in Chile and commissioned several ESO instruments, including the AO instrument NACO. In 2002, he obtained the first NACO observations of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Galaxy. 

In 2010, he returned to Australia to take up a position as an ARC Future Fellow at the AAO. In 2011, he founded OzDES, a project to follow-up targets discovered by the Dark  Energy Survey (DES).The data collected by OzDES and DES has led to numerous discoveries, and over three hundred refereed papers.

In 2018, he joined the ANU and became the Director of SSO, an office that he holds today. He currently spend about 50% of my time managing the observatory and the rest of his time on research, teaching and student supervision.

In 2021, he started a new program to replace historic low-redshift SN samples using the WiFES insrtumenrt on the now fully robitic ANU 2.3m. These data will be used to test recent evidence for thawing dark energy using supernovae and other cosmological probes.

He is a CI in the  OzGRAV Centre of Excellence and is interested in using gravitational wave sirens to constrain cosmological parmeters. He is also part of LSST and 4MOST.

PhD in astronomy.