news 2024

A team of astronomers has found that Venus has never been habitable, despite decades of speculation that our closest planetary neighbour was once much more like Earth than it is today. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, studied the chemical composition of the Venusian atmosphere and inferred that its interior is too dry today for there ever to have been enough water for oceans to exist at its surface.

What can exploding stars teach us about how blood flows through an artery' Or swimming bacteria about how the ocean's layers mix' A collaboration of researchers, including from the University of Cambridge, has reached a milestone toward training artificial intelligence models to find and use transferable knowledge between fields to drive scientific discovery.

Scientists from NASA and our Department of Physics have used supercomputer simulations to reveal that Mars' moons may have been formed from destroyed asteroid fragments. The researchers found that an asteroid passing near Mars could have been pulled apart by the planet's gravity, with the resulting rock fragments strewn into a range of orbits.

Uranus's upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades - and now scientists have shown why. Observations from Earth have shown Uranus' upper atmosphere has been cooling for decades, with no clear explanation. Now, a team led by Imperial College London scientists has determined that unpredictable long-term changes in the solar wind - the stream of particles and energy coming from the Sun - are behind the drop.

An international team that includes the University of Bath has discovered three ultra-massive galaxies in the early Universe forming at unexpected speeds. An international team that was led by the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and includes Professor Stijn Wuyts from the University of Bath has identified three ultra-massive galaxies - each nearly as massive as the Milky Way - that had already assembled within the first billion years after the Big Bang.

Mysteries about Uranus that have baffled scientists for decades may have been the result of an unusually powerful solar storm that happened to occur as a spacecraft visited the planet, a new study involving UCL researchers has found. NASA's Voyager 2, which flew by Uranus in 1986, provided scientists' first, and so far only, close glimpse of the planet, shaping their understanding of it in the decades since.

The first human tissue samples from Oxford's Space Innovation Lab (SIL) have been launched and are on their way to the International Space Station, where they will be used to study the effects of space microgravity on the human ageing process. Researchers from the SIL flew to the Kennedy Space Centre (Florida, USA) to integrate the samples into the payload in preparation for the launch, which took place early in the early hours of Tuesday 5th November (UK time).

Samples collected from the surface of the Moon by the crew of Apollo 16 more than 50 years ago have helped scientists reconstruct billions of years of lunar history. The research team's findings, published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, are based on analysis of a distinct set of lunar breccias that have never been scrutinised in detail before.

Scientists believe they could have pinpointed the age of the largest and oldest impact basin on the Moon to over 4.32 billion years ago. The Moon, like the Earth, has been bombarded by asteroids and comets since its formation, leaving behind craters and basins. However, the exact timing and intensity of most of these events, notably the oldest and largest basin on the Moon, have remained unclear to scientists-until now.

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge. Volatiles are elements or compounds that change into vapour at relatively low temperatures.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the 'inside-out' growth of a galaxy in the early universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang. This galaxy is one hundred times smaller than the Milky Way, but is surprisingly mature for so early in the universe. Like a large city, this galaxy has a dense collection of stars at its core but becomes less dense in the galactic 'suburbs'.

A UK team of researchers including UCL's Professor Lucie Green are working on the launch of a spacecraft mission which will allow us to view the Sun's atmosphere in more detail than ever before. The proposed MESOM mission will enable researchers to study the conditions that create solar storms, leading to improvements in forecasts of space weather on Earth.

The precise distances from Earth of more than 1.8 million galaxies have been revealed in a sky survey involving UCL researchers. The Physics of the Accelerating Universe Survey (PAUS), an international collaboration across 14 institutions, covered a sky area of 50 square degrees, similar to approximately 250 full moons.

A Durham physicist is part of an international research team that has discovered the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen in space, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. The jets' size is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back. The research was led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and involved scientists at multiple universities, including Dr Roland Timmerman of our Department of Physics.

The number of patients per GP has soared by 9%, rising to a massive 32% when taking chronic conditions into account, a new study in England by University of Manchester researchers has found. The increase - identified from data between 2015 and 2022 - occurred alongside an overall drop in GP supply of 2.7% over the same period, due to falling contractual hours.

Scientists have developed a new way of searching for elusive dark matter, which makes up 85% of all matter in the Universe, using detectors that are meant to observe gravitational waves. The researchers, who were looking for a specific ultra-low-mass form of dark matter, reached a factor 10,000 improvement over previous world-leading results using Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) data from 2019-2020.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars. The international team, co-led by the University of Cambridge, used Webb to observe a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way in the early universe, about two billion years after the Big Bang.

A new cheap, easily-manufactured device could lead to improved satellite communication, high speed data transmission, and remote sensing, scientists say. A team of engineers led by researchers from the University of Glasgow have developed a ultrathin 2D surface which harnesses the unique properties of metamaterials to manipulate and convert radio waves across the frequences most commonly used by satellites.

Here's a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial. From brain fluid surgery to a lunar-Earth flyby from the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), here is some quick-read news from across Imperial. Spacecraft slingshot success The European Space Agency (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), with Imperial kit on board , has successfully completed a world-first lunar-Earth flyby.

New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector narrow down the possibilities for what makes up our universe's invisible mass. Figuring out the nature of dark matter, the invisible substance that makes up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest puzzles in physics. New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), have put new limits on the potential properties of one of the leading dark matter candidates: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.