Past news items

2009

Extrasolar planet discoveries

Smallest transiting extrasolar planet

The CoRoT satellite has discovered a planet only twice as large as the Earth orbiting a star slightly smaller than the Sun. Dr Suzanne Aigrain is a member of the CoRoT team that made the discovery.

First images of multi-planet system around another star

Dr Jennifer Patience is member of an international team of researchers releasing the first images of a multi-planet system around a normal star, much like our own solar system. Three planets, each several times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting the star HR 8799.

2007

Exeter's supercomputer

In December 2007, Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) installed a large Altix ICE 8200 High Performance Computer system at the University of Exeter. The system has 1280 Intel compute cores (160 nodes each with 2 quad-core chips and Infiniband interconnect). Exeter Astrophysics is one of the main users of the facility, using it to perform simulations of star and planet formation.

Space telescope spots new planet

Suzanne Aigrain is part of a team of astrophysicists from Europe and Brazil who on May 3rd 2007 announced the first results of this new French led-space telescope. CoRoT's dual purposes are to probe the insides of stars by monitoring their tiny brightness variations, and to detect planets down to a few Earth sizes around stars other than the Sun. It started science operations only in February 2007, and the extremely high data quality that enabled these early results bodes extremely well for future results. The story was picked up by the BBC and New Scientist.

2006

Strongest magnetic fields in the universe...

Daniel Price at Exeter, in collaboration with Stephan Rosswog at the International University Bremen, Germany, have shown that the collision of two neutron stars produces what may be the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, and in just one millisecond! The result adds weight to the idea that such collisions are the powerhouse behind the mysterious short Gamma Ray Bursts. The story has been picked up by BBC News and also New Scientist.

2005

Matthew Bate wins EURYI award

Matthew Bate has won a prestigious European Young Invesigator (EURYI) award worth more than £800,000 to further his world-leading research on star and planet formation. See the ESF and PPARC press releases.

Andrew Bunker awarded Leverhulme Prize

Dr Andrew Bunker has been awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize worth £50,000 to support his research on distant galaxies. These prizes are awarded across a broad range of academic disciplines to outstanding young scholars whose research has been internationally recognised.

Old stars in the young universe

Andy Bunker and Laurence Eyles at Exeter, in collaboration with a number of US astronomers, have used new Spitzer Space Telescope to see light from old stars in the most distant galaxies yet seen. The story has been picked up by BBC News...

2004

Hubble's deepest shot a puzzle

Andy Bunker is leading the team studying the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The BBC reports on their puzzling results.

Transit of Venus

The Astrophysics Group at the University of Exeter provided a live web feed covering the transit of Venus on the 8th of June 2004. More information about the transit can be obtain from the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Fly through of WR104

The massive binary star WR104 produces a spiral dusty nebula that has been imaged at infrared wavelengths using the Keck telescopes by John Monnier and co-workers. We are performing numerical simulations of the nebula in order to measure its mass and the size of its carbon dust grains. The image is a link to a movie that shows a fly-through of density structure used in the models. The near-IR light from the nebula comes from just the first turn - all the others receive no direct light from the central binary system, and so are at much lower temperatures.

2003

The Observatory

The group observatory is on the roof of the Physics Building, and is primarily used for undergraduate teaching.