Physics and Astronomy

Astronomers Commission New High-Speed Camera on the Very Large Telescope

British scientists have opened a new window on the Universe with the recent commissioning of ULTRACAM on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

ULTRACAM is an ultra fast camera capable of capturing some of the most rapid astronomical events. It can take up to 500 pictures a second in three different colours simultaneously. It has been designed and built b

A University of Leicester team is involved in a newly-selected NASA mission to Jupiter due to be launched in 2010.

The mission, called Juno, will now proceed to preliminary design phase – it is the second in NASA’s New Frontiers Program.

The mission will conduct a first-time, in-depth study of the giant planet. The aim is to place a spacecraft in a polar orbit around Jupiter to investigate the existence of an ice-rock core; determine the amount of global water and a

Thanks to measurements by the D-CIXS X-ray spectrometer, ESA’s SMART-1 spacecraft has made the first ever unambiguous remote-sensing detection of calcium on the Moon.

SMART-1 is currently performing the verification and calibration of its instruments, while it runs along its science orbit, reaching 450 kilometres from the Moon at its closest distance. During this calibration phase, which precedes the actual science observations phase, the SMART-1 scientists are getting acquaint

A violent and chaotic-looking mass of gas and dust is seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby supernova remnant. Denoted N 63A, the object is the remains of a massive star that exploded, spewing its gaseous layers out into an already turbulent region.

The supernova remnant N 63A is a member of N 63, a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Visible from the southern hemisphere, the LMC is an irregular galaxy lying 160,000 light-years from our own Milky

Many people have dreamt at some point of being an astronaut and travelling through space but hardly any get the opportunity to fulfil these childhood dreams. If you are a scientist with an engineering, maths or physics background the University of Surrey (UniS) may be able to help you reach for the stars with its newly-launched MSc and BEng/MEng courses in Space Technology and Planetary Exploration. While UniS cannot promise to launch you into the cosmos, these new courses can at least launch your

Of the billions of stars in the universe, the most massive play a crucial role but are the least understood. A major Leeds-led project is searching the skies to locate these elusive stars, and help us understand more about how the galaxies work.

“We know how big stars end – they explode as supernova and can form black holes – but we know little about how they’re formed,” explains Dr René Oudmaijer in physics and astronomy. “These stars play an important role in the evolution