Dr Karen Masters from the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) won a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, which will help fund a two-year project on red spiral galaxies. Karen will use data from Galaxy Zoo, an online astronomy project which invites members of the public to assist in classifying over 60 million galaxies.

The Leverhulme Trust makes awards for the support of research and education. Early Career Fellowships aim to provide career development opportunities for those who are at a relatively early stage of their academic career but with a proven record of research.

Karen said: “I am over the moon to win this fellowship as it secures me two more years at ICG working on something I am hugely passionate about. It’s great to gain recognition from Leverhulme for all my previously published papers and very exciting to spend the next two years working on something so fascinating.

“Some of the red galaxies in crowded regions of galaxy clusters are actually spiral galaxies, bucking the trend for red galaxies to be elliptical in shape. Thanks to Galaxy Zoo we now have an enormous number of visually classified red spiral galaxies, which are intriguing.

“These red spirals may be a ‘missing link’ between normal blue star-forming spirals and red, dead ellipticals. They are rare objects which will provide insight into processes causing the end of star formation in all spirals and will inform us about the fate of our own Galaxy, which is a typical spiral.”

Professor David Wands, from the ICG, said: “Karen is hoping to uncover many clues about how galaxies formed, and the processes which change them throughout the history of the universe. Further work is needed on red spiral galaxies and I am delighted that Karen is carrying out this significant research at Portsmouth.”

The initial funding aims to help scientists unlock the secrets of the Sun, seek out distant planets that could harbour life, and search for dark energy – the elusive constituent thought to make up 74 per cent of the mass-energy in the Universe.

Cosmologists at Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) will be working on the mission named Euclid. This was selected from more than 50 original ideas to go forward for detailed technical and cost assessments.

The other two missions are called PLATO and Solar Orbiter. The three missions are part of the European Space Agency’s Cosmic Vision Programme and the agency will decide in June 2011 which two of the three to build and launch between 2017 and 2020.

Professor David Wands, acting director of ICG, said: “This is great for UK science and the University of Portsmouth. Being part of such international missions allows our scientists to play on the international stage and be innovative and work on the most exciting science.”

Euclid would address key questions relevant to fundamental physics and cosmology including the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter.

Current theory suggests that these substances dominate the ordinary matter of stars and planets. In particular, dark energy has been proposed to explain the observation made by astronomers last decade that – contrary to expectations – the Universe is expanding faster now compared to billions of years ago.

Euclid would effectively look back in time about 10 billion years, covering the period over which dark energy seems to have accelerated the expansion of the Universe, and map the distribution of galaxies to reveal the underlying ‘dark’ architecture of the cosmos.

Euclid would use two different methods to build its map. One of the methods – weak gravitational lensing – maps the dark matter and measures dark energy by measuring the distortions of galaxy images. The other method involves studying baryonic acoustic oscillations – wiggle patterns, imprinted in the clustering of galaxies, which provide a standard against which to measure dark energy and expansion in the Universe.

If selected for development, Portsmouth scientists will work with their partners in eight other universities — University College London, Durham, the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh, UK ATC, Oxford, Hertfordshire, the Open University and the University of Cambridge.

Portsmouth cosmologists have won £1.4m to fund further research into the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang and the emergence of structure in our Universe.

The Science and Technology Facilities Council grant will fund theoretical cosmology research at Portsmouth for the next five years, and recognises the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation as one of the country’s top research groups.

The aim is to better understand what the universe is made of and the nature of gravity.

The Institute, at the University of Portsmouth, is home to researchers surveying the present Universe and seeking to understand its origins.

David Wands, Professor of Cosmology at the Institute, said: “Nationally, there is fierce competition for funding, especially at the present time. Many UK groups face cutbacks, but Portsmouth has been able to maintain funding for our work because we are addressing some of the big questions in science today.

“You could say the Big Bang was the ultimate physics experiment and we are studying what happened in the immediate aftermath. It was in that fraction of a second when structure first appeared in the Universe, ultimately forming the stars and galaxies we see today.

“The Universe contains dark energy and dark matter, as well as radiation and the ordinary matter, which makes up stars, planets and people. The different amounts and nature of these constituents are revealed in the distribution of matter that we see in the Universe today.

“We aim to push back the boundaries of scientific understanding, especially in extreme conditions that you cannot recreate on earth, to better understand the basic forces of nature.”

Theoretical cosmology is worth funding for many reasons, not least because basic science underpins the development of high technology, he said.

“In the Victorian age scientists developed an understanding of electricity and magnetism. It was the ‘blue skies’ research of its day and what they discovered forms the building blocks for all modern technology.”

Scientists at the Institute will teach on the university’s new applied physics degree course starting this autumn. They also contribute to teaching on other courses including mathematics, engineering and computing.