Astronomy group news page
Please check this page for important announcements and general astronomical news.
First images from combined multi-national LOFAR
1 February 2011 Press release
"In the quest to discover more about our Universe and the birth of stars and galaxies, a new UK telescope connected for the first time to others across Europe has delivered its first 'radio pictures'. The images of the 3C196 quasar (a black hole in a distant galaxy) were taken in January 2011 by the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). LOFAR (Low Frequency Array), which is co-ordinated by ASTRON in the Netherlands, is a network of radio telescopes designed to study the sky at the lowest radio frequencies accessible from the surface of the Earth with unprecedented resolution."Read the rest of the press release here.
MeerKAT telescope time allocations - ThunderKAT project rated highly
22 October 2010 Press release
"Five years before South Africa's MeerKAT telescope becomes operational, more than 43 000 hours of observing time (adding up to about five years) have already been allocated to radio astronomers from Africa and around the world, who have applied for time to do research with this unique and world-leading instrument."Prof. Rob Fender of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton is a co-principal investigator for the ThunderKAT project (The Hunt for Dynamic and Explosive Radio Transients with MeerKAT), which was rated highly and subsequently awarded 3000 hours of telescope time.
Read the rest of the press release here.
LOFAR-UK station inaugurated
20 September 2010
On Monday 20th September 2010, the LOFAR-UK station at Chilbolton Observatory was formally opened by Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell.
Molecular clouds reveal a past episode of violent activity at the centre of the Milky Way
25 May 2010 Press release
"The central black hole of the Galaxy, today surprisingly quiet, has undergone, several hundred years ago, a violent phase of
activity. This is the conclusion reached by an international team led by astrophysicists of the APC laboratory and including scientists of the Service d'Astrophysique of CEA-Irfu,
by studying the high energy emission of molecular clouds located in the central regions of the Galaxy."
Read the rest of the press release, view a movie of the observations, or refer to the original publications on astro-ph: arXiv:1003.2001 and arXiv:1005.4807.
A binary origin for 'blue stragglers' in globular clusters
15 Jan 2009 Press release
"Astronomical researchers have discovered evidence that blue stragglers in globular clusters,
whose existence has long puzzled astronomers, are the result of 'stellar cannibalism' in binary stars".
"Dr Christian Knigge, Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton, Alison Sills, associate professor in physics and astronomy at McMaster University, and Nathan Leigh, PhD student in physics and astronomy at McMaster, will publish their findings in the journal Nature on Thursday 15 January"
Read the rest of the press release, or refer to the original publication in nature.
Southampton astronomers catch unique nova explosion
24 Nov 2008 Press release
"The Southampton team was part of an international study led by astronomers from
UCL (University College London)
that recorded the explosion of a binary star inside a planetary nebula".
"The University of Southampton involvement in the project was led by Dr Christian Knigge, supported by PhD student Helena Uthas, who obtained some key observations for the team, and Professor Brian Warner, one of the world's leading experts on nova explosions".
Read the rest of the press release.
The story is also covered by sciencedaily.com.
Latest science results from INTEGRAL
1 Sep 2008
INTEGRAL detets signature of critical cosmic accelerator
ESA:
"Polarized photons provide an insight into the nature and energies of the
particles that radiated them; this in turn gives us a handle on the nature
of the acceleration processes at work in cosmic sources. INTEGRAL's
detection of polarized gamma-rays from the Crab pulsar, reported by
Dean and
colleagues in the 29 August issue
of Science, has significant implications
for many aspects of high-energy accelerators."
IPHAS Initial Data Releas with the Southampton-led Emission Line Source Catalogue
10 Dec 2007
A collaboration of over 50 astronomers, The IPHAS consortium, led from the UK, with partners in Europe, USA, Australia, has released today (5th December 2007) the first comprehensive optical digital survey of our own Milky Way. Conducted by looking at light emitted by hydrogen ions, using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma, the survey contains stunning red images of nebulae and stars. The data is described in a paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
To date, the IPHAS survey includes some 200 million unique objects in the newly released catalogue. This immense resource will foster studies that can be at once both comprehensive and subtle, of the stellar demographics of the Milky Way and of its three-dimensional structure.
IPHAS is embracing a recent change in the way astronomers share data. As well as being available through traditional web access it is also being published through a Virtual Observatory interface, where it can automatically be cross-referenced with other relevant data catalogues.
The IPHAS database is already revealing a wealth of new science. For example, IPHAS team members Dr. Andrew Witham and Dr. Christian Knigge from the University of Southampton, have led an effort to extract and catalogue the brighter H-alpha emission line stars revealed so far by the survey. This list of nearly 5000 objects is already the longest single list of its kind. The distribution of these special objects, across the northern sky, traces 'hot spots' of recently formed stars in our Galaxy much more convincingly than has been possible hitherto. Dr. Knigge, who is a Reader in the School of Physics and Astronomy and oversaw the construction of the catalogue, notes: "By providing astronomers with such a large and a convenient list of Hydrogen emitting stars, we hope to make it much easier to find and study these intrinsically very rare objects".
The IPHAS survey will eventually be extended to cover the entire galactic plane of our galaxy, with a coverage approaching 4000 square degrees (for comparison, the moon on the sky as seen from Earth covers only about one tenth of a square degree).
This is an image of the centre of the Rosette Nebula, as imaged in Hydrogen alpha emission in the IPHAS survey. The centre
of this HII region, where the exciting star cluster (NGC 2244) is located, lies at the middle-bottom of this image (N is to the
left, and E down). The longer dimension in this image is approximately 30 arcminutes.
(credits: Nick Wright,
University College London) Image taken using the
Isaac Newton Telescope.
The paper reference is Gonzalez-Solares et al, 2007. Access is also available via the web. The paper presenting the catalogue of H-alpha emission line stars: Witham et al, 2007.
