The nearest supernova of its type to be discovered for 40 years is predicted to be at its brightest 7-8 September and will be visible through a good pair of binoculars.
The supernova, which was first spotted on 24 August by scientists from Oxford University and the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) collaboration, is in the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101.
Whilst not visible to the naked eye, with a clear sky anyone can observe the supernova using a good pair of binoculars or a small telescope:
An international team of physicists has developed a novel X-ray technique for imaging atomic displacements in materials with unprecedented accuracy. They have applied their technique to determine how a recently-discovered class of functional materials known as multiferroics can develop magnetic order and a ferroelectric polarization simultaneously. Multiferroics are candidate materials for new classes of electronic devices.
BATAVIA, Illinois The physics community got a jolt last year when results showed for the first time that neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, anti-neutrinos, might be the odd man out in the particle world and have different masses. This idea was something that went against most commonly accepted theories of how the subatomic world works.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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