The Astrophysics Research Centre (ARC) is a major centre for observational and theoretical research in astronomy and astrophysics. The ARC is one of the core research centres within the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queen's University Belfast. We currently have 14 academic and 40 postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers working on solar physics, atomic and molecular astrophysics, solar system bodies, exoplanets, supernovae and explosive transients. We have links to laboratory astrophysics programmes, fusion research, and atomic processes in plasmas.

Our staff have leadership roles in several international projects ranging from all-sky time domain surveys (the NASA funded ATLAS and Pan-STARRS projects, ESO surveys) to the novel Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawai'i. We have led instrumentation development, software infrastructure design and data processing operations for these intensive projects and have leadership roles in the UK's membership of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Our exoplanet research team use ESO facilities and space missions combined with discovery surveys to characterise other worlds. We develop theoretical radiative transfer models combined with expertise in atomic and molecular astrophysics, and exploit the UK’s high performance computing facilities for much of this work.