news

Some of the most fundamental questions about the Universe will be investigated by UCL particle physicists, following a £4.34 million award from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The funding is part of a £60 investment from STFC awarded to 18 universities, helping to keep the UK at the forefront of particle physics research.

A new way of dating collisions between asteroids and planetary bodies throughout our Solar System's history could help scientists reconstruct how and when planets were born. Our work shows that we need to draw on multiple lines of evidence to be more certain about impact histories - almost like investigating an ancient crime scene Craig Walton A team of researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, combined dating and microscopic analysis of t

A rare exoplanet which orbits around two stars at once has been detected using a ground-based telescope by a team led by the University of Birmingham. The planet, called Kepler-16b, has so far only been seen using the Kepler space telescope. It orbits around two stars, with the two orbits also orbiting one another, forming a binary star system.

A ring of planetary debris studded with moon-sized structures has been observed orbiting close to a white dwarf star, hinting at a nearby planet in the "habitable zone" where water and life could exist, according to a new study led by UCL researchers. White dwarfs are glowing embers of stars that have burned through all their hydrogen fuel.

Scientists from the University of Oxford are field-testing seismic sensors in the bitter conditions of Antarctica to simulate the solar system's icy moons. The Antarctic deployment is the first in what is hoped to be a series of extreme environment tests for the short-period (SP) sensor - a seismometer that records the high-frequency (high pitched) seismic waves generated by movement in the ice sheets.

Scientists at The University of Manchester and The University of Glasgow have today provided more insight into the possibility of establishing a pathway to generate oxygen for humans to potentially call the Moon or Mars 'home' for extended periods of time. Creating a reliable source of oxygen could help humanity establish liveable habitats off-Earth in an era where space travel is more achievable than ever before.

New research on generating oxygen from water found on the surfaces of other planets could help support future long-term missions to the Moon and Mars. Researchers from the University of Glasgow and colleagues took a series of gruelling flights into microgravity to study how the different gravitational pull of other planets could affect the process of electrolysis.

Planetary scientists from the University of Glasgow have lent their support to an important new study of a Martian meteorite. The research, led by Curtin University in Australia, has found the first physical evidence of high-intensity damage caused by asteroid impact in ancient Martian meteorites, which could help identify when conditions suitable for life may have existed on early Mars.

Scientists have shown how the freezing of a 'slushy' ocean of magma may be responsible for the composition of the Moon's crust. Cooling of the early magma ocean drove such vigorous convection that crystals remained suspended as a slurry, like the crystals in a slushy machine. Jerome Neufeld The scientists, from the University of Cambridge and the Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, have proposed a new model of crystallisation, where crystals remained suspended in liquid magma over hundreds of millions of years as the lunar 'slush' froze and solidified.

Researchers from the School of Geographical & Earth Sciences have contributed to a new study ­of a Martian meteorite which could provide insights into the reactions that led to the building blocks of life on early Earth. The study, led by the Carnegie Institution for Science and , demonstrates that organic molecules found in a meteorite that hurtled to Earth from Mars were synthesized during interactions between water and rocks that occurred on the Red Planet about 4 billion years ago.

The results of a comprehensive search for a background of ultra-low frequency gravitational waves has been announced by an international team of astronomers including scientists from the Institute for Gravitational Wave Astronomy at the University of Birmingham. These light-year-scale ripples, a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity, permeate all of spacetime and could originate from mergers of the most massive black holes in the Universe or from events occurring soon after the formation of the Universe in the Big Bang.

Our world-leading science and engineering at The University of Manchester has been the cause of some exciting stories this year. Whether it's space, materials, or the climate, our stories have been top news across the country and the world. Here's some of the most popular and interesting news releases from the Faculty of Science and Engineering in 2021.

A new study shows it's theoretically possible. The hypothesis could be tested soon with proposed Venus-bound missions. If life is there, how does it propagate in an environment as dry as the clouds of Venus? Paul Rimmer It's hard to imagine a more inhospitable world than our closest planetary neighbour.

A new method of analysing the complex data from massive astronomical events could help gravitational wave astronomers avoid a looming computational crunch. Researchers from the University of Glasgow have used machine learning to develop a new system for processing the data collected from detectors like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

The NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope, which includes hardware designed and built at UCL and which will image the very first stars to shine in the Universe, is scheduled to be launched into space later this month. The telescope, one of the great space observatories following Hubble, will be launched on-board the Ariane rocket from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana on or after Friday 24 December.

The technologies behind one of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the century - the detection of gravitational waves - are now being used in the long-standing search for dark matter. Thought to make up roughly 85% of all matter in the Universe, dark matter has never been observed directly and remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in modern physics.

Credit Norbert JunkesMPIfR (Effelsberg), Letourneur and Nançay Observatory (NRT), ASTRON (WSRT), ATNFCSIRO (Parkes), Anthony Holloway (Jodrell Bank), NRAOAUINSF (VLBA), NSFAUIGreen Bank Observatory (GBT). Researchers at The University of Manchester have helped conduct a 16-year long experiment to challenge Einstein's theory of general relativity.

A new concept has been developed that has the potential to assist new instruments in the investigation of fundamental science topics such as gravitational waves and dark matter. The concept is described in a paper written by UK Quantum Technology Hub Sensors and Timing researchers at the University of Birmingham and published in , and a related patent application filed by University of Birmingham Enterprise.

An international team involving researchers at UCL has discovered a new planet, GJ 367 b, whose surface temperature may reach 1,500 degrees Centigrade - hot enough to melt all rock and metal - and which takes only eight hours to orbit its star. In a new study, published in the Science journal, the researchers show that the planet, which is 31 light years from Earth, is one of the lightest among the nearly 5,000 exoplanets (planets outside our own solar system) that are known today, with half the mass of Earth.

Research into the logic behind AI shows that algorithms think in reliable and scientific ways that could help us learn undiscovered laws of physics, say PhD candidate Kai Hou Yip and Dr Quentin Changeat (both UCL Physics & Astronomy). Do you know what the Earth's atmosphere is made of? You'd probably remember it's oxygen, and maybe nitrogen.