Astronomers at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy are currently studying an unusual comet. Known as 2I/Borisov, this comet is only the second one in history to be shown to have come from beyond our Solar System, following the discovery two years ago of 1I/‘Oumuamua.
While the first Interstellar Object (ISO) had very strange properties - it was small and had a very elongated shape, and showed almost no evidence of comet-like activity - Borisov appears more like the comets of our own Solar System. It shows a clear coma and tail, and this has allowed astronomers to measure its composition, through spectroscopic investigation of the unique signatures of gasses in the coma.
Edinburgh astronomers Cyrielle Opitom and Colin Snodgrass have been studying the comet using the UK’s telescopes in the Canary Islands (the Isaac Newton and William Herschel telescopes), and are now training the European Southern Observatory’s ‘Very Large Telescope’ (one of the most powerful in the world) on the comet as it moves into Southern hemisphere skies.
Results so far indicate that, despite its origin in the planetary system around a distant star, comet Borisov has a composition quite similar to our own Solar System’s comets. It appears to be closest in composition to a class of comets known as ‘carbon chain depleted’, which make up around a third of Solar System comets, and tend to come from the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies at the edge of the planetary region (the region where Pluto is found), rather than the much more distant Oort cloud at the very edge of the Sun’s influence, which is the source of long period comets.
Congratulations to students who received Medals, Certificates, Prizes and Scholarships at the School of Physics & Astronomy Undergraduate Student Awards Ceremony.
Head of School, Prof Jim Dunlop presented the awards to students in recognition of their outstanding marks and achievements in the last academic year.
Certificates & Medals
36 pre-honours students received certificates of merit for their achievement in Physics and Maths courses in years 1 & 2. A total of 20 Class Medals were awarded to the students with the highest overall mark for their degree programme.
Prizes, Bursaries & Scholarships
31 Prizes, Bursaries and Scholarships were awarded to students. Recipients included William Lindved and Tommaso Bruggi who were both presented with a Nichol Foundation Scholarship and Marion A S Ross Prize. These are awarded to Junior Honours students with the highest marks. The Margaret Ann Stewart Memorial Prize, for the graduating student with the highest overall mark across all degree programmes, was awarded to Maria Derda.
Many congratulations to all recipients.
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The University of Edinburgh has received £650,000 to provide essential contributions to the DUNE experiment.
This is part of a UK multi-million pound investment in a global science project that brings together the scientific communities of the UK and 31 countries from Asia, Europe and the Americas to build the world’s most advanced neutrino observatory. DUNE (the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) is a flagship international experiment hosted by the United States Department of Energy’s Fermilab, which will be designed and operated by a collaboration of over 1,000 physicists.
Professor Stefan Söldner-Rembold of the University of Manchester, who leads the international DUNE collaboration as one of its spokespersons, commented:
DUNE has the unique potential to answer fundamental questions that overlap particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.
This £30M investment from UK Research and Innovations’ Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is a four-year construction grant to 13 UK educational institutions and to STFC’s Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories. UK scientists and engineers will design and produce components at the core of the DUNE detector, which will comprise four large tanks each containing 17,000 kg of liquid argon. The UK groups are also developing a state-of-the art, high speed data acquisition system, together with the computing systems and sophisticated software needed to record, interpret and exploit the data.
The University of Edinburgh’s School of Physics and Astronomy is constructing the computing and software infrastructure to process and simulate the data that will be recorded. The scale of DUNE will be second only to that of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) programme, necessitating a global distributed system based upon the Worldwide Computing Grid. Edinburgh physicists and software engineers are working on the complex globally distributed data management system needed to catalogue and deliver the multi peta-Byte data sets to large data centres, as well as the development of artificial intelligence systems for recognising signals in the detector coming from neutrino interactions.
Neutrinos will be produced at Fermilab and fired through the earth to re-emerge some 1300km later in the underground mine where DUNE is situated. DUNE will study the behaviour of these neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos. This will provide insight as to why we live in a matter-dominated universe where antimatter has largely disappeared. DUNE will also watch for neutrinos from supernovae, and will investigate whether protons live forever or eventually decay, bringing us closer to fulfilling Einstein’s dream of a grand unified theory.
Professor Peter Clarke, the DUNE lead at the University of Edinburgh commented:
This award is excellent news for the Particle Physics Group here in Edinburgh. DUNE will set a new standard for neutrino detector technology. It is particularly exciting to know that we will become part of an experiment that may discover matter antimatter asymmetry in neutrino interactions, as well as become part of the global supernova watching community.
Professor Franz Muheim, of the Particle Physics Experiment group said:
Neutrinos are fascinating particles and the scale of the experiment poses an exciting challenge to record the information from the detectors.
The UK universities involved in the project are: Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield, Sussex, University College London and Warwick.
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Students, staff, industry and supporters gathered to learn about the career development projects students completed over the summer, and to announce the winner of the best project report and poster.
The School of Physics and Astronomy runs a Career Development Scholarship programme, funding and supporting students to undertake research projects over the summer period.
This year 42 undergraduate students took part in the programme. Students can undertake an academic project based in the School or a project based in industry. Projects have a duration of around 8 weeks, and students are provided with a stipend of £1,500.
These projects enable students to gain new skills, experience different workplaces and create a network of contacts. In many cases, students also got the opportunity to work on problems with immediate real world applications.
Grace Alster, who is currently in year 4 of the BSc (Hons) Computational Physics degree was presented with £1000 for the best project poster and report. Grace’s project, on the behaviour of methane and water inside icy planets was titled ‘Computational molecular dynamics of methane and water mixture under extreme conditions using CASTEP’. She was awarded the prize by the Head of School, Prof Jim Dunlop.
Grace commented:
Undertaking a project in summer was a great way to gain insight into what postgraduate research is like. It has made me more informed about my options after graduating, and given me the kind of skills I will need whether I end up in industry or academia. I’m glad I took the opportunity, and very thankful to Lewis (Project Advisor) and Andreas (Project Supervisor) for all their help.
Project supervisor, Dr Andreas Hermann reported:
I am absolutely delighted for Grace to have won the prize for the best summer project poster and report - having seen the amazingly high standard of work produced by all summer students it must have been a tough competition! I always try to get summer students to work on projects we are currently puzzling over, so they see how real research looks like: there is a lot of communication, dedication, and some ingenuity - yet outcomes are always uncertain. Here, Grace looked at (under expert guidance by my PhD student Lewis Conway) how methane and water mix under conditions found inside icy planets; not a place we can go and study in situ, so accurate computational modelling is indispensable.
Lewis Conway, Project Advisor said:
It was great having Grace working with us over the summer. She did some great work collecting large data sets and writing Python scripts to analyse them. Thanks to Grace, the research project has a firm grounding on which we hope to develop.
I think these summer projects are incredibly useful. I did a summer project when I was an undergraduate and it definitely influenced my decision to pursue a PhD. I hope that Grace has found it equally as enlightening!
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Dr Xin Ran Liu from the School of Physics and Astronomy joined fellow eminent scientists in Beijing on 31 October to present at the ‘Why The Dark Matters’ event, hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAM), and jointly organised with the UK Research Institute (UKRI).
Dark Matter is the as-yet-undetectable substance that is thought to make up over 80 percent of the mass of the universe. Dark matter is a material that cannot be seen directly, but we know that dark matter exists because of the effect it has on the objects that we can observe.
Understanding dark matter is important in helping us understand the size, shape and future of the universe, and in helping us explain the formation and evolution of galaxies and clusters.
This event was one of over 100 worldwide events held on 31 October to mark ‘World Dark Matter Day’. The ‘Why The Dark Matters’ event consisted of interactive expert lectures to a local audience of several thousand, and a further live online audience of around 100,000. It included a live satellite link between China and the UK’s Boulby Underground Laboratory, which has a strong legacy in the field of dark matter research, and is where much of Dr Liu's research is based.
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Edinburgh scientists are taking part in the most detailed survey of the Universe ever undertaken. The aim of the five-year programme is to shed light on Dark Energy – the mysterious force thought to be pushing galaxies apart and causing the Universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has been designed and built by an international collaboration of scientists. It is taking part in its first fully functioning experiment, from its position atop the Mayall Telescope in Arizona.
One of DESI’s crucial components is its array of 5,000 robotic fibre-optic eyes that swivel in a choreographed dance, each focusing on a distant galaxy. In perfect sky conditions they will enable the instrument to measure the light of 5,000 galaxies in around 20 minutes.
The instrument’s near complete range of components is designed to point automatically at preselected galaxies, gather their light and then split it into various bands of colour. This will precisely map their distance from Earth and gauge how quickly the galaxies are moving away from us.
When formal observations begin in 2020, DESI will peer deeply into the Universe’s infancy and early development – up to 11 billion years ago – to create the most detailed 3-D map of the Universe ever produced.
Over its five year run, DESI will repeatedly map the distance to 35 million galaxies and 2.4 million star-like quasars. The mapping of the galaxies will teach scientists more about Dark Energy and quasars, which are among the brightest objects in the sky.
Overall, it will provide precise measurements of the Universe’s expansion rate and tell scientists exactly how this rate has varied over time. This could bring them closer to figuring out the mechanism for the acceleration of the expansion.
Global alliance
An international team of more than 500 researchers and 75 institutions including Edinburgh’s Institute for Astronomy have collaborated on the project for more than a decade.
Edinburgh’s expertise stems from the Institute’s work on the influential Two-degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dFGRS) for which the School of Physics & Astronomy's Professor John Peacock was jointly awarded the prestigious Shaw Prize for Astronomy in 2014.
Professor Peacock commented:
DESI will define a new state of the art for studying the large-scale structure of the Universe. This has always been a scientific area in which the UK has been strong, and we’re very happy to be part of this wonderful project.
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The interdisciplinary work involves collaboration from a team of scientists, including husband and wife team Dr Bartek Waclaw (from the School of Physics and Astronomy) and Dr Justyna Cholewa-Waclaw (from Adrian Bird’s lab in the School of Biological Sciences). Their discovery shows the existence of a novel mechanism of gene regulation.
Different types of animal cells (muscle cells, liver cells, neurons etc) produce different proteins in order to perform their function. This process, called gene expression, is tightly regulated: even a small increase in the production rate of a particular protein can have dramatic consequences (disease or even death).
The research team investigated the role of a particular chemical molecule called MeCP2, an abundant methylated-DNA binding protein, on this process. MeCP2 is present mostly in the brain and too much or too little of it causes autism-like disorders. A combination of experiments and mathematical modelling reveals how this chemical is regulated. MeCP2 acts as a "roadblock" for the enzyme RNA polymerase that moves down the DNA expressing genes. Traffic jams of RNA polymerases created behind MeCP2 molecules slow down gene expression. This slow-down is tuned to produce just the right amount of proteins required for neurons in the brain to work correctly.
As well as showing the existence of a novel mechanism of gene regulation, this work suggests that replicating this mechanism by using drugs or gene therapy could have therapeutic implications for patients with certain types of autism.
Astronomers have pieced together the cannibalistic past of the neighbouring large galaxy Andromeda, which has set its sights on our Milky Way as the main course.
The galactic detective work found that Andromeda has eaten several smaller galaxies, likely within the last few billion years, with left-overs found in large streams of stars.
This study was led by Dr Dougal Mackey from the Australian National University (ANU) and Professor Geraint Lewis from the University of Sydney, and involves a team of researchers from across the globe, including Professor Annette Ferguson and Professor Jorge Penarrubia from the School’s Institute for Astronomy.
The international team also found evidence of more small galaxies that Andromeda gobbled up even earlier, perhaps as far back as during its first phases of formation about 10 billion years ago.
Dr Mackey from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics reported:
The Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in about four billion years, so knowing what kind of a monster our galaxy is up against is useful in finding out its ultimate fate. Andromeda has a much bigger and more complex stellar halo than the Milky Way, which indicates that it has cannibalised many more galaxies, possibly larger ones.
The signs of ancient feasting are written in the stars orbiting Andromeda, with the team studying dense clusters of stars, known as globular clusters, to reveal the ancient mealtimes. By tracing the faint remains of these smaller galaxies with embedded star clusters, they team have been able to recreate the way Andromeda drew them in and ultimately enveloped them at the different times. The discovery presents new mysteries however, with the two bouts of galactic feeding coming from completely different directions.
Professor Lewis said:
This is very weird and suggests that the extragalactic meals are fed from what’s known as the ‘cosmic web’ of matter that threads the universe. More surprising is the discovery that the direction of the ancient feeding is the same as the bizarre ‘plane of satellites’, an unexpected alignment of dwarf galaxies orbiting Andromeda.
Professor Annette Ferguson commented:
This is a very interesting result that we will have to work quite hard to understand. It demonstrates how much information about the past lives of galaxies lies buried in their remote outer parts.
The study, published in Nature, analysed data from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey, known as PAndAS.
The team involved institutions from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, France and Germany.
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Visit the Postgraduate Open Day to find out about our MSc programmes and PhD opportunities
On 13 November, academic staff, current students and alumni will be involved in a number of events including:
• MSc and PhD information sessions
• talks on student life
• tours of the facilities and labs.
The University is also running talks on careers and funding, and tours of accommodation and sports facilities.
To find out more, visit:
An international team of astronomers have made a historic discovery, detecting gas molecules in a comet which has tumbled into our solar system from another star.
It is the first time that astronomers have been able to detect this type of material in an interstellar object. The discovery marks an important step forward, as it will now allow scientists to begin deciphering exactly what these objects are made of and how our home solar system compares with others in our galaxy.
Comet Borisov was discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov in August. Observations over the following 12 days showed that it was not orbiting the Sun, but was just passing through the Solar system on its own path around our galaxy. By 24 September it had been renamed 2I/Borisov, the second interstellar object ever discovered by astronomers. Unlike the first such object discovered two years ago, 1I/'Oumuamua, this object appeared as a faint comet, with a surrounding atmosphere of dust particles, and a short tail.
A team of colleagues, including Dr Colin Snodgrass from the School’s Institute for Astronomy, used the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands to detect the gas in the comet.
Astronomers at the observatory pointed the giant telescope at the comet low down in the morning sky between 6am and 7am last Friday. Passing the faint comet light into a spectrograph enabled the astronomers to measure how much light the comet was emitting as a function of wavelength, or colour. The spectrum allows them to detect individual types of gas by their spectral fingerprints. The data was received at midday, and by 5pm that evening they knew they had successfully detected gas for the first time. The gas detected was cyanogen, made of a carbon atom and a nitrogen atom bonded together. It is a toxic gas if inhaled, but it is relatively common in comets.
Combining these spectra with filtered images of the comet obtained with the TRAPPIST-North telescope in Morocco, the team also measured the amount of dust being ejected by the comet, and placed limits on the size of the central nucleus. Preliminary analysis based on the amount of gas seen coming off the nucleus suggests that it is likely that much of the surface is active, in contrast to typical short period comets.
The team concluded that the most remarkable thing about the comet is that it appears ordinary in terms of the gas and dust it is emitting. It looks like it was born 4.6 billion years ago with the other comets in our Solar system, yet has come from an - as yet - unidentified star system.
As the comet approaches the Sun it will become brighter and more visible to astronomers. The team will follow 2I's evolution as it travels through our Solar System. In comparison, astronomers have a shorter period to study other comets, as was the case with 'Oumuamua, before it became too faint.
The team consists of Alan Fitzsimmons (Queen's University Belfast), Olivier Hainaut, Cyrielle Opitom, Youssef Moulane and Bin Yang (European Southern Observatory), Karen Meech, Jacqueline V. Keane and Jan T. Kleyna (University of Hawai'i), Emmanuel Jehin (Universite de Liege), Marco Micheli (European Space Agency), and Colin Snodgrass (University of Edinburgh).
The European Space Agency approved a space mission earlier this year that may visit a future interstellar visitor. Dr Colin Snodgrass in the team is also Deputy Principal Investigator on the ESA Comet Interceptor, due to be launched in 2028.
Colin Snodgrass commented:
This new discovery is very exciting for Comet Interceptor. Although we can't reach comet Borisov, it shows that interstellar comets can be discovered on their way into the solar system, which gives us more hope that we could visit one.