news 2013

Satellite's first all-sky image is the most detailed picture to date of the early Universe, giving us a better understanding of its birth.

Study reveals chemical composites of exoplanet atmospheres 128 light years away. Scientists say techniques will "one day provide evidence of life beyond Earth". The really exciting thing is that, one day, the techniques we've developed will give us our first secure evidence of the existence of life on a planet outside our solar system Ian Parry Astronomers have conducted the first remote reconnaissance of a distant solar system, using new telescope imaging techniques to reveal the chemical composition of exoplanets orbiting a star 128 light years from Earth.

Astrophysicists at the University of Glasgow are looking to the Northern and Southern Lights to expand our understanding of solar flares. In a new paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy suggest magnetic waves, which contribute to the formation of auroras on Earth, could help energy from solar flares travel tens of thousands of kilometres in under a second.

July 4th, 2012 – a landmark, red-letter day in a physicist's calendar. It was the day that CERN webcast a special seminar of the latest results from the Large Hadron Collider. It was the day when the world went particle physics mad, celebrating the discovery of the long sought and long elusive Higgs boson.

Scientists have detected a rocky planet that is smaller than Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, orbiting a solar-type star 80% of the size and mass of the Sun, according to research published today (Wednesday 20 February 2013). The exact dimensions of the star, and the absolute size of the planet, were determined by asteroseismologists led by the University of Birmingham.

Sussex physicists have taken a small step towards fulfilling Einstein's dream of proving there is only one fundamental force in nature. Following last year's discovery of the Higgs boson particle - the so-called "God particle" that answers how the particles have masses - Xavier Calmet and PhD student Michael Atkins looked at how the Higgs field interacts with gravity.

Scientists at the University of Glasgow together with the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre and the Natural History Museum (London) have discovered the first evidence of water dissolving the surface of Mars. In a paper published in the Meteoritical Society's journal MAPS , the research team outline the results of tests on a 1.7-gram fragment of a Martian meteorite known as Nakhla, which was provided by the Natural History Museum.

A new way of measuring the mass of supermassive black holes could revolutionise our understanding of how they form and help to shape galaxies. The technique, developed by a team including Oxford University scientists, can spot the telltale tracer of carbon monoxide within the cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen) circling a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant galaxy.

A new study by Michael Rowan-Robinson, former Head of Astrophysics at Imperial, and Brian May, who recently completed the PhD he abandoned to become Queen's lead guitarist, has modelled the space dust in the solar system. They conclude that 70 per cent of the dust that is found between the Sun and Mars comes from comets, 22 per cent is from asteroids and around seven and a half per cent comes from outside the solar system, dust from interstellar space.

Using a satellite X-ray telescope combined with terrestrial radio telescopes the pulsar was found to flip on a roughly half-hour timescale between two extreme states; one dominated by X-ray pulses, the other by a highly-organised pattern of radio pulses. The research was led by Wim Hermsen from The Netherlands Institute for Space Research and the University of Amsterdam and will appear in the journal Science on the 25th January 2012.

An area of the Amazon rainforest three times the size of the United kingdom was strongly affected by a drought that began in 2005, says a NASA-led team that includes researchers from Oxford. The results, together with observed increases in rainfall variability and associated forest damage in southern and western Amazonia during the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be witnessing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change.

Volunteers from the Planethunters.org website, part of the Oxford University-led Zooniverse project, have discovered 15 new planet candidates orbiting in the habitable zones of other stars. Added to the 19 similar planets already discovered in habitable zones, where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water, the new finds suggest that there may be a 'traffic jam' of all kinds of strange worlds in regions that could potentially support life.