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.
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.
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.
Andy Eyre's DPhil thesis "On the Dynamics of Tidal Streams in the Milky Way Galaxy" was the runner up in the competition for the 2010 Michael Penston Prize for the best astronomy thesis submitted to a UK university during 2010. Andy was a member of the Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics and rebuilt the Centre's computer system in parallel with completing his thesis.
A gamma-ray burst detected by NASAʼs Swift satellite may be the most distant object known in the Universe. The burst marked the explosion of a massive young star at a time when the Universe was only about half a billion years old (compared to its present age of 13.7 billion years). The discovery paper was led by Antonino Cucchiara (formerly Penn State, now at UC Berkeley) and is presented in the Astrophysical Journal by an international team of astronomers, including Oxford astronomers Philipp Podsiadlowski and Christian Wolf.
An international team of scientists, led by Leigh Fletcher of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, have reported the first ever infrared views of an enormous swirling storm in Saturn's springtime hemisphere in the journal
The 2nd Fast Imaging Sensors Workshop was held at the Jesus College Conference Centre on 5 May 2011, organised by Andrei Nomerotski (Oxford Physics), Mark Brouard and Claire Vallance (Oxford Chemistry), and Renato Turchetta (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, RAL). The aim of the workshop was to review progress in the field of fast two-dimensional detectors, as well as to discuss their current and potential future applications.
Andrea Schiavi, Dr Adam S Wyatt, Professor Ian Walmsley
We're delighted to show you our new website. It has been many months in the making, and is the first of many exciting new web developments for the department.
The site is a big step forward for us, mainly because we've built it using a sophisticated content management system. This lets us share responsibility for maintaining our site content, so that we can all keep the site up to date, effective and beautiful.
Oxford Photovoltaics, a company recently spun out from the University of Oxford by Isis Innovation Ltd., has developed new solar cell technology that is manufactured from cheap, abundant, non-toxic and non-corrosive materials and can be scaled to any volume.
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