The discovery of three closely orbiting supermassive black holes in a galaxy more than four billion light years away could help astronomers in the search for gravitational waves: the ‘ripples in spacetime’ predicted by Einstein.

Spring 2014

Congratulations to Professor Joe Silk, who has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. Joe is the former Savilian Professor of Astronomy and is an Emeritus Professorial Fellow of New College. He has also has affiliations with the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris and Johns Hopkins University. Joe has published widely in many different areas of theoretical astrophysics, and is especially well known for his contributions to cosmology, where he originated the idea of "Silk damping", a process important for setting the galactic mass scale.

Dr Boon Kok Tan has been awarded the 2014 MERAC Prize of the European Astronomical Society for the Best Doctoral Thesis in the area of New Technologies for his thesis in the field of sub-millimetre wave astronomy.

The research has contributed significantly to the advancement of the state of the art of coherent detector technologies. This includes fully integrated SIS mixer chips with wide RF and IF bandwidth, which are suitable for future heterodyne arrays, and advanced designs such as balanced and single side-band mixers.

Oxford Physics Postdoc research fellow Tessa Baker has won a gold medal and £3,000 in the SET for Britain poster competition finals held at the House of Commons on 17 March.

She was among 210 early career researchers who were shortlisted to display their work to politicians and a panel of expert judges. Her research, which looks at how the laws of gravity relate to the largest scales across the universe, was judged the best among entries from the 29 finalists in the physics category.

The University of Oxford Centre for Astrophysical Surveys has been established with the help of a £1.5m gift from the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation established by businessman and philanthropist Sir Michael Hintze. The Centre will fund a team of research fellows and graduate students that will provide a focus for the physicists at Oxford working on surveys searching for the invisible dark matter and dark energy thought to make up 95% of the Universe, exploring transient sources such as pulsars, and looking at how galaxies evolve.