This artist’s impression shows the magnetic white dwarf WD 0816-310, where astronomers have found a scar imprinted on its surface as a result of having ingested planetary debris. When objects like planets or asteroids approach the white dwarf they get disrupted, forming a debris disc around the dead star. Some of this material can be devoured by the dwarf, leaving traces of certain chemical elements on its surface. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers including UCL researchers found that the signature of these chemical elements changed periodically as the star rotated, as did the magnetic field. This indicates that the magnetic fields funnelled these elements onto the star, concentrating them at the magnetic poles and forming the scar seen here. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

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2/26/2024

Academic staff from the Department of Space and Climate Physics discuss, the postgraduate taught programmes available with the department and answer questions on the admissions process.

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2/18/2022

Credit: Dr Harley Katz, Beecroft Fellow, Department of Physics, University of Oxford. The video shows the formation and evolution of the first stars and galaxies in a virtual universe similar to our own. The simulation begins just before cosmic dawn, when the universe is devoid of starlight, and runs to the epoch 550 million years after the Big Bang. The age of the universe in millions of years is shown in the upper left. The inset focuses on the evolution of a galaxy. Purple regions display the filamentary distribution of gas, composed mostly of hydrogen. White regions represent starlight and the yellow regions depict energetic radiation from the most massive stars.

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6/24/2021