Institute of Astronomy

News and Press Releases

UK-led robotic sky scanner reveals its first galactic fingerprint

Published on 13/12/2022 

A major telescope upgrade has peered through to the distant Universe to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies 280 million light years away from Earth.

The spectra provide a first glimpse of the sky from the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) – a unique upgrade to the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma on the Canary Islands.

Non-detection of key signal allows astronomers to determine what the first galaxies were – and weren’t – like

Published on 05/12/2022 

Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.

 

Using data from India’s SARAS3 radio telescope, researchers led by the University of Cambridge were able to look at the very early Universe – just 200 million years after the Big Bang – and place limits on the mass and energy output of the first stars and galaxies. 

 

Study of ‘polluted’ white dwarfs finds that stars and planets grow together

Published on 23/11/2022 

 

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.

New from Webb Telescope: An Exoplanet Atmosphere as Never Seen Before

Published on 22/11/2022 

Known for beaming stunning images back to Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just scored another first: a molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world’s skies. 

Gaia Collaboration to Receive 2023 Berkeley Prize

Published on 09/11/2022 

The Gaia collaboration, which is responsible for the spacecraft that is currently building the largest and most precise three-dimensional map of our galaxy, will receive the 2023 Lancelot M. Berkeley − New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy.