Wyn Evans' Homepage


I am Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge University . The photograph shows me as I looked twenty years ago as a Research Fellow of King's College Cambridge. I was formerly Reader in Theoretical Physics at Oxford University and Lindemann Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

I usually teach courses on Astrophysical Dynamics, Galaxy Formation and Galactic Dynamics in Part III of the Mathematical Tripos.

I campaign against bullying and harassment in academia. Bullies in academia are a feature, not a bug. The qualities associated with top academics are present in the kinds of people who bully others. Not all top academics are bullies, of course, but quite a few are. If you wish to contact me about a bullying issue in Cambridge University, please use this email.

Here are some articles on bullying:

  • "Bullying is a Feature of UK Research Universities, not a Bug". This is an article in The Times Higher Educational Supplement of 30 August 2023. You may register with the THES site and read it for free. The full text of the article is also here.
  • "Bullying and How To Survive it" from Telescoper's Blog (Telescoper is Prof Peter Coles)
  • "The Bullying of Hannelore" from Telescoper's Blog. This is a horrific account of bullying in an unidentified UK University.

    • Research

    I have worked on new stable belts of Near-Earth Objects, the first microlensing events towards M31, as well as discoveries of new ultra-faint dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, such as the Orphan Stream in the iconic Field of Streams.

    I was co-discoverer of the four tails of the Sagittarius galaxy, the stream in Andomeda II and the Gaia Sausage. I have developed new mechanisms for hypervelocity stars. In theoretical physics, I pioneered the study of superintegrability and have provided new exact solutions of the Boltzmann and Fokker-Planck equations.

    My departmental home page is here, and includes my most recent preprints.

    Selected Press Releases

  • Mass of a Lone White Dwarf (Hubble Space Telescope PR)
  • The Gaia Sausage (Cambridge University PR)
  • The Beast with Four Tails (Cambridge University PR)
  • Discovery of four new dwarf galaxies (Nature PR)

    • Papers on the web

  • All Years at Cambridge
  • All Years at Oxford

    • Students

    Prospective graduate students are invited to email me to discuss possible Ph.D. projects. Recent students have worked on galactic structure and substructure, gravitational lensing and microlensing, the Gaia data releases, variable stars, theoretical galactic dynamics and machine learning.

    I am currently supervising Sam Ryan, Elliot Davies and Adam Dillamore.