News

25 August 2011

Nearest supernova of its type for 40 years

Astronomers have discovered a bright, nearby supernova, otherwise known as an exploding star, and say it is the nearest of its type observed for 40 years.

The supernova was spotted in the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101, a spiral galaxy a mere 21 million light years away, lying in the famous constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major).

Scientists from the Department of Physics, University of Oxford made the discovery with their colleagues from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) collaboration, using a robotic telescope in California in the United States.
26 July 2011

Hints of a Higgs Boson?

The Oxford Particle Physics group is playing a key role in the search for the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The most recent search results were presented by the ATLAS collaboration at the European Physical Society meeting in Grenoble. These intriguing results show an excess of events that would be consistent with decays of Higgs bosons to pairs of W particles.
26 July 2011

Hints of a Higgs Boson?

The Oxford Particle Physics group is playing a key role in the search for the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The most recent search results were presented by the ATLAS collaboration at the European Physical Society meeting in Grenoble. These intriguing results show an excess of events that would be consistent with decays of Higgs bosons to pairs of W particles.
24 July 2011

New Journal of Physics "Best of 2010"

One of our recent papers, 'Investigation of the role of plasma channels as waveguides for laser-wakefield accelerators' has been selected to appear in the New Journal of Physics' "Best of 2010" collection.

Further details on this paper may be found here.
18 June 2011

Physics Department annual newsletter now available

Oxford Physics has produced the first edition of an annual newsletter, aiming to describe the wide range of work that we do in front-line research, teaching, public outreach and school education. We would welcome contributions to future newsletters from undergraduate or postgraduate alumni and previous members of the physics department.
15 June 2011

T2K Experiment finds first indication of muon to electron neutrino oscillation

The T2K experiment, whose primary purpose is to study neutrino interactions at a large distance from their source, has detected 6 electron neutrino candidate events based on the data collected before March 11, 2011. For the first time, it was possible to observe an indication that muon neutrinos are able to transform into electron neutrinos over a distance of 295 km through the quantum mechanical phenomena of neutrino flavor oscillations.
14 June 2011

Corot Satellite finds ten more exoplanets

The latest exoplanet discoveries made by the Corot satellite will be presented at a meeting at the Institute of Physics on 15 June by Dr Suzanne Aigrain. Corot is a satellite developed by the French Research agency CNES. It uses the transit method to find planets around stars, making very accurate brightness measurements of stars to detect the dips in brightness that occur when planets pass in front of a star, blocking out a fraction of the starlight.
14 June 2011

CoRoT satellite announces 10 new planets

An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has discovered ten new planets. Amongst them is one orbiting a star perhaps only a few tens of million years old, twin Neptune-sized planets, and a rare Saturn-like world.

The planets were detected using the CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and Transits) space telescope, operated by the French space agency CNES. It discovers planets outside our solar system – exoplanets – when they ‘transit’, that is pass in front of their stars.
9 June 2011

Learning about Our Galaxy from its Nearest Galactic Neighbours

Is the Milky Way a typical galaxy? What can we learn about it from looking at its nearest neighbours, the Magellanic Clouds? Comparing a giant numerical simulation of millions of galaxies, with observations of galaxies from the largest survey of the sky carried out to date, an international team of astrophysicists including Oxford's Phil Marshall set out to answer these questions.
8 June 2011

Green light for Clarendon 2 building!

We are very pleased to announce that the Oxford City Council Planning Committee has granted planning permission for the Clarendon Laboratory 2 (CL2) building with a unanimous vote, subject to ratification by the full Council.

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