Departmental news

The sight of an asteroid being ripped apart by a dead star and forming a glowing debris ring has been captured in an image for the first time.

Led by Christopher Manser of the University of Warwick’s Astrophysics Group, the researchers investigated the remnants of planetary systems around white dwarf stars...

Coming hot on the heels of the Nobel Prize award for the discovery of neutrino oscialltions, the Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics 2016 has recognized five collaborations studying neutrino oscillations. One of them, the T2K neutrino oscillation project, has had major contributions from the Warwick T2K group headed by Dr Gary Barker and Dr Steve Boyd.

On November 8, representatives from the five experiments accepted the award in a televised event in the USA...

A team including Warwick beamline scientist Oier Bikondoa has published in Nature Photonics a new approach to fabricate more efficient and cheaper X-ray detectors for medical applications. In radiography, the human body is exposed to X-rays and the transmitted intensity is captured by a detector. With more efficient detectors the exposure to X-rays can be reduced...

New research led by physicists at the University of Warwick has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the Northern Lights, and space weather – particularly the interaction of events in the sun’s atmosphere with Earth’s ionosphere.

The research team, led by Prof Sandra Chapman, used data from over 100 individual magnetometers located at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere. These magnetometers have been used for decades to track space weather but it is only recently that the data from all these devices has been collected in one place in the SuperMAG project...

Published in the journal Nature, a team including Warwick astronomer Peter Wheatley has discovered a giant comet-like tail of hydogren gas evaporating from a Neptune-sized exoplanet. The gas is thought to be boiled off by X-rays from the parent star and then swept away by radiation pressure. The tail was revealed in Hubble Space Telescope observations in which 56% of the star is covered by the tail in ultraviolet light. The planet is losing its atmosphere at a rate of 1000 metric tonnes per second, having narrowly escaped total evaporation by the intense X-ray irradiation it suffered when its parent star was young and active. Read the Warwick press release, the full journal article in Nature, or the preprint from ArXiv.

Water delivery via asteroids or comets is likely taking place in many other planetary systems, just as it happened on Earth, new research by the Warwick Astronomy & Astrophysics group strongly suggests.

Published by the Royal Astronomical Society and led by the University of Warwick, the research finds evidence for numerous planetary bodies, including asteroids and comets, containing large amounts of water.

The research findings add further support to the possibility water can be delivered to Earth-like planets via such bodies to create a suitable environment for the formation of life.

Jack has developed a wireless device that detects and uses detailed 3D movements in your fingertips to interact with a computer. It has huge potential in the multi-billion pound gaming industry and other niche markets such as remotely operated machinery.

It works by combining information from cameras and wireless sensors, and in the future this technology could even replace traditional computer keyboards and mice to enable people to create and manipulate digital information with their hands in a free and natural way. It could also enable people to perform new tasks that would previously have been too complex or intricate, such as sorting and processing large and disparate data.

Its accuracy and affordability make it stand out from other consumer technologies on the market, and it could be a key enabler in bringing augmented and virtual reality technologies into the mainstream. The device is currently in prototyping and is expected to reach the market in the next few years.

You can see a video of his work here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckhyMxF8lOQ

Warwick astronomers have begun searching for small planets around bright stars using an array of twelve robotically-controlled telescopes. The telescopes, which form a wide-field observing system called the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), are designed to detect the slight dimming of a star when a planet passes across its face. The NGTS team aims to find planets the size of Neptune down to twice the size of the Earth. Dr Peter Wheatley, one of the NGTS project leaders, said "The NGTS discoveries, and follow-up observations by telescopes on the ground and in space, will be important steps in our quest to study the atmospheres and composition of small planets such as the Earth.”

Read more in press releases from ESO and Warwick.
See also regional BBC News coverage.

Students have been selected from a competition to win a 4 day trip to Grenoble to visit the ESRF, ILL and XMaS Beamline. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/xmas_comes_early 

Results from the EPP team working on the LHCb experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider have been featured prominently in a new composition entitled "LHChamber music". Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of CERN, the piece uses "sonification" to turn data into music, and has been performed by physicists working on the LHC. This story has been picked up by media such as the Guardian newspaper.

The section of the composition related to the Warwick team's result can be found here.

More information on the Warwick LHCb group's research can be found by clicking here.

A previous Warwick Physics sonification project based on turning images into music can be found here.