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

EHT researchers created around 1.8 million computer models simulating Sagittarius A* and narrowed them down to a handful of best fit models, the best of which is shown in this video. This is what radio telescopes might observe if they had infinite resolution. Credit: Ziri Younsi, Christian M. Fromm, Yosuke Mizuno & Luciano Rezzolla

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5/12/2022

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

Connected Learning Leads were established during the first lockdown period as peer-level support to co-ordinate the pivot to online learning in their departments.

Alison Clark-Wilson, Dima Khazem, Ian Raper, Daniel Verscharen and Zachary Walker talk about courage, well-being and fun as well as engagement in asynchronous and synchronous sessions, going from pedagogy to technology, and putting the student experience at the centre while adapting teaching and learning to dynamic contexts.

Recorded on 16 April 2021.

See UCL Education Conference submission for more information:
https://reflect.ucl.ac.uk/education-conference-2021/2021/04/06/78/

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4/18/2021

This zoom video starts with a view of ALMA, a telescope in which ESO is a partner and that is part of the Event Horizon Telescope, and zooms-in on the heart of M87, showing successively more detailed observations. At the end of the video, we see the first ever image of a black hole — first released in 2019 — followed by a new image released in 2021: how this supermassive object looks in polarised light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarisation, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. Credit: © ESO/L. Calçada, Digitized Sky Survey 2, ESA/Hubble, RadioAstron, De Gasperin et al., Kim et al., EHT Collaboration. Music: Niklas Falcke

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3/24/2021