Japan’s SLIM moon lander has shockingly survived a third lunar night
Drawing a line back to the origin of life: Graphitization could provide simplicity scientists are looking for
Scientists from the Cambridge University have suggested that molecules vital to the development of life could have formed from a process known as graphitisation. Once verified in the laboratory, the finding could allow scientists to recreate plausible conditions for life's emergence. It has long been debated how the...
Tue 25 Jun 11:30: TBC
Details to be confirmed
- Speaker: Blake Sherwin (DAMTP)
- Tuesday 25 June 2024, 11:30-12:30
- Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre and online (details to be sent by e-mail).
- Series: New Frontiers in Astrophysics: A KICC Perspective; organiser: Steven Brereton.
Tue 25 Jun 11:30: TBC
Details to be confirmed
- Speaker: Blake Sherwin (DAMTP)
- Tuesday 25 June 2024, 11:30-12:30
- Venue: Hoyle Lecture Theatre and online (details to be sent by e-mail).
- Series: New Frontiers in Astrophysics: A KICC Perspective; organiser: Steven Brereton.
Tue 30 Apr 11:15: Radio observations of extra-galactic transients with the AMI-LA telescope
The Arcminute Microkelvin Imager – Large Array has been instrumental in the study of radio transients. In this talk I will give an overview of the current extragalactic transients monitoring program which is running on AMI -LA. To demonstrate the power of AMI -LA in improving our shock physics in extragalactic transients I will go through two examples of events where AMI -LA has been instrumental. Starting with the most relativistic systems: GRBs have been observed by AMI -LA from as early as 2012 with the ALARRM rapid follow up system. GRB 221009A , also known as the brightest of all time, has demonstrated the unparalleled temporal coverage achievable with AMI -LA from a few hours to over 100 days post burst. AMI -LA has also enabled us to draw conclusions that wouldn’t be possible with other facilities such as the jetted tidal disruption event AT2022cmc that was first reported in 2022. Due to the high cadence light curve with AMI -LA, we were able to prove for the first time, in a model independent manner that the radio emission originated from a highly relativistic outflow. Such a result has been vital in terms of our understand of tidal disruption events and can now infer the presence of off-axis jets such as AT2018hyz.
- Speaker: Dr. Lauren Rhodes (University of Oxford)
- Tuesday 30 April 2024, 11:15-12:00
- Venue: Coffee area, Battcock Centre.
- Series: Hills Coffee Talks; organiser: Charles Walker.
Mon 29 Apr 13:00: Cosmology from Non-Gaussian fields
In this talk I will discuss several challenges towards detecting primordial non-Gaussianties. With the CMB running out of modes, we have started focussing on large scale structure. Measurements of the 21cm brightness temperature allow us to observe almost our entire past light cone. Based on comoving volume arguments, the epoch starting during the dark ages and ending the epoch of reionzation (EoR) potentially contain a lot of modes. Besides being hard to detect, even at these high redshifts, when modes were more linear, I will argue both signal confusion and non-Gaussian covariance have to be considered. During the EoR, the tracer field is very non-Gaussian and standard summary statistics might no longer suffice. I will discuss how machine learning could help solving some of these challenges, while also benefiting efforts to understand astrophysical evolution during these epochs. Finally, ML applications in cosmology are rapidly developing. We should remain cautious and apply common sense. I will discuss an example of what could happen if we don’t.
- Speaker: Daan Meerburg (University of Groningen)
- Monday 29 April 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: CMS, Pav. B, CTC Common Room (B1.19) [Potter Room].
- Series: Cosmology Lunch; organiser: Fiona McCarthy.
Using Rest-Frame Optical and NIR Data from the RAISIN Survey to Explore the Redshift Evolution of Dust Laws in SN Ia Host Galaxies
Thu 13 Jun 11:30: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Sergio Martin Alvarez (Stanford)
- Thursday 13 June 2024, 11:30-12:30
- Venue: Ryle seminar room + online.
- Series: Galaxies Discussion Group; organiser: Sandro Tacchella.
Hubble Spots the Little Dumbbell Nebula
To celebrate the 34th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch, the telescope captured an image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula, or M76. M76 is a planetary nebula, an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star that eventually collapses to an ultra-dense and hot white dwarf. It gets its descriptive name from its shape: a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring.
Since its launch in 1990 Hubble has made 1.6 million observations of over 53,000 astronomical objects. Most of Hubble’s discoveries were not anticipated before launch, such as supermassive black holes, the atmospheres of exoplanets, gravitational lensing by dark matter, the presence of dark energy, and the abundance of planet formation among stars.
Learn more about the Little Dumbbell Nebula and Hubble.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI
Gaia DR3 detectability of unresolved binary systems
Star Formation Shut Down by Multiphase Gas Outflow in a Galaxy at a Redshift of 2.45
Nature, Published online: 22 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07412-1
Star Formation Shut Down by Multiphase Gas Outflow in a Galaxy at a Redshift of 2.45Preventing space contamination rises up the agenda
Voyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space
Groundbreaking survey reveals secrets of planet birth around dozens of stars
In a series of studies, a team of astronomers (including IoA postdoc Álvaro Ribas) has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The stunning images, captured using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, represent one of the largest ever surveys of...
Fri 26 Apr 13:00: Uniqueness of extremal black holes in de Sitter
Uniqueness theorems for black holes with a cosmological constant are only known in a few limited cases. In my talk I present a recent uniqueness theorem for the extremal Schwarzschild-de Sitter black hole within the class of analytic vacuum spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant containing a static extremal Killing horizon. The proof is based on establishing the uniqueness of transverse deformations to the near-horizon geometry at each order in the transverse parameter. I also present a generalisation to charged extremal black holes in de Sitter and discuss the analogous problem in the case of negative cosmological constant. The talk is based on 2309.04238 [gr-qc] and 2403.08467 [gr-qc].
- Speaker: Dávid Katona, The University of Edinburgh
- Friday 26 April 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Potter room/Zoom.
- Series: DAMTP Friday GR Seminar; organiser: Xi Tong.
Wed 24 Apr 10:00: Neural ratio estimation: the future of supernova cosmology?
Simulation-based inference (SBI) has the potential to revolutionise how we do supernova cosmology and let us incorporate arbitrarily complex effects within a Bayesian model. I will present recent work which sought to validate neural ratio estimation (NRE) by comparing NRE -derived posteriors on supernova properties to those obtained with a likelihood-based MCMC approach for the same data, and then discuss how NRE and SBI in general provide a pathway towards a model extending all the way from type Ia supernova light curves to cosmological parameters as part of a single analysis.
- Speaker: Matthew Grayling (University of Cambridge)
- Wednesday 24 April 2024, 10:00-11:00
- Venue: Martin Ryle Seminar Room, KICC.
- Series: Astro Data Science Discussion Group; organiser: David Yallup.