School of Physics and Astronomy

Prof Arthur Trew has stepped down as Head of School after 8 years. As Prof Jim Dunlop takes the helm, he tells us about his vision for the School.

Prof Jim Dunlop has a number of priorities for the School.  For students, this includes creating a sense of community and ensuring appropriate facilities are in place.  For staff he has plans for greater collaboration across the professional service teams and academic colleagues, and to streamline activities to reduce some of the administration burden. “Many of my first tasks however will be determined by requirements relating to the research excellence framework exercise”, the 2021 assessment on the quality of research in UK higher education institutions.

Prior to this tenure, Prof Dunlop held the post of Head of the Institute for Astronomy for 6 years, growing the Institute to cover broader areas of astronomical research and an increased range of PhD opportunities. He has gained valuable experience negotiating the Institute’s vision alongside competing School priorities and University requirements, while maintaining a successful collaborative relationship with the UK Astronomy Technology Centre with which the Institute shares the Royal Observatory site. 

Jim is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the Institute of Physics (FInstP). Throughout his time as an academic, he has been awarded funding by the STFC (Science and Technology Funding Council) and ERC (European Research Council) and received the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. His research focuses on extragalactic astronomy and cosmology - the study of the Universe on the largest scales, and over all of cosmic time, however he has long had a broad interest in all areas of physics and astronomy.

He wants to ensure students and staff have the chance to be the very best in their fields and departments, and to continue strengthening the School’s position as a leading institute for physics and astronomy in terms of research, teaching, industrial exchange and community engagement.

I have every confidence that together we can achieve this vision, not least because we have a committed team of staff and students who have the ambition to succeed in all that they do.

Scientists lead international project to build the world’s first space rock mining devices which use bacteria to recover minerals and metals from rocks on the Moon and Mars.

Astronauts will test the devices on board the International Space Station, following the successful launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday 25 July from NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral. Rock mining in space could open up a new frontier in space exploration by giving astronauts the resources they need for long periods in Space, whether on the Moon, Mars or asteroids.

Scientists based at the University of Edinburgh have developed 18 matchbox-sized prototypes, called biomining reactors, to test how low gravity affects the ability of bacteria to extract materials such as iron, calcium and magnesium from space rocks. Eighteen of the devices will undergo tests on the space station, which involve exposing basalt rock to the bacteria, before they are returned to Earth to be analysed in a lab.

Professor Charles Cockell, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, who is leading the project, said: 

This experiment will give us new fundamental insights into the behaviour of microbes in space, their applications in space exploration and how they might be used more effectively on Earth in all the myriad way that microbes affect our lives.

The ‘BioRock’ experiment is led by the University of Edinburgh, with the European Space Agency and the UK Space Agency, and is funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, part of UKRI. The project involves researchers from across Europe, including institutions in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. It is the second UK-led experiment to take place on the space station, after the ‘Worms in Space’ experiment launched in December 2018.

The experiment at the International Space Station will also study how microbes grow and form layers – known as biofilms – on natural surfaces in space. The findings could have numerous applications on Earth, including in the recovery of metals from ores using the biomining process and the study of how microbes form biofilms that have enormous implications for industrial and medical processes.

Dr Rosa Santomartino, of the School of Physics and Astronomy, who is leading the study of the rocks when they return, said:

Microbes are everywhere, and this experiment is giving us new ideas about how they grow on surfaces and how we might use them to explore space.

Congratulations to Prof Wilson Poon who has been awarded the Sam Edwards Medal and Prize for his outstanding contributions to the fundamental study of condensed matter physics, statistical physics and biophysics using model colloidal systems.

Prof Poon is known internationally for his groundbreaking research on colloid physics. In the early 1990s he was one of the first scientists to recognise the potential of combining hard-sphere colloids with depletion interactions to create model systems with fully tuneable interactions. Using these systems, Prof Poon has worked together with collaborators and addressed fundamental questions in condensed matter physics such as the nature of the liquid state and of kinetic arrest in glasses and gels.

From around 2005, Prof Poon began working on biophysics.  Since then his work on active particles, including both bacteria and synthetic colloidal swimmers, has provided impetus for theory development in the frontier area of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics and thrown light on practically important biological phenomena such as the growth of biofilms. He has also recently conducted pioneering work on the rheology of dense, non-Brownian suspensions, an industrially very important but poorly-understood class of soft materials.

In the last five years alone, he has published 13 high impact papers in these new research areas. Some of these have originated from industrial collaborations through the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP). Set up by Poon in 2012, ECFP has now worked with more than 40 companies in multiple sectors, demonstrating the practical utility of ‘model systems’ and the fecundity of industrial collaborations for generating basic science.  

The Sam Edwards Medal and Prize is one of the Institute of Physics’ ‘Silver Subject Medals’ and is awarded annually to recognise and reward the highest quality research and application of physics.

New analysis suggests a natural origin for our first interstellar visitor, ‘Oumuamua

Early reports of ‘Oumuamua’s odd characteristics back in 2017 led some to speculate that the object could be an alien spacecraft, sent from a distant civilization to examine our star system.

First spotted by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System 1 telescope located at the University of Hawaii’s Haleakala Observatory, the object defied easy description, simultaneously displaying characteristics of both a comet and an asteroid.

Astronomers named the object 1I/2017 U1 and appended the common name ‘Oumuamua, which roughly translates to “scout” in Hawaiian. Researchers had a few weeks to observe and collect data on ‘Oumuamua before it traveled beyond the reach of Earth’s telescopes.

New analysis however strongly suggests that ‘Oumuamua has a purely natural origin.

A research team led by scientists at the University of Maryland’s Department of Astronomy, along with input from collaborators from across the US and Europe, including the School of Physics and Astronomy’s Dr Colin Snodgrass, reported their findings in Nature Astronomy.

Observations have confirmed that ‘Oumuamua is red in color, has an elongated, cigarlike shape and an odd spin pattern—much like a soda bottle laying on the ground, spinning on its side. While it appears to accelerate along its trajectory—a typical feature of comets—astronomers are puzzled to find no evidence of the gaseous emissions that typically creates this acceleration.

There are a number of mechanisms by which ‘Oumuamua could have escaped from its home system. For example, the object could have been ejected by a gas giant planet orbiting another star. According to theory, Jupiter may have created the Oort cloud—a massive shell of small objects at the outer edge of our solar system—in this way. Some of those objects may have slipped past the influence of the sun’s gravity to become interstellar travelers themselves.

The research team suspects that ‘Oumuamua could be the first of many interstellar visitors, and look forward to analyzing data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile, which is scheduled to be operational in 2022 to discover more on such visitors. The LSST is a major international project led by US astronomers, physicists and engineers. The UK is one of the major international partners in LSST, with UK involvement funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and coordinated by astronomers at the University of Edinburgh.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has just announced that its latest mission, Comet Interceptor, will visit a comet from the very edge of our Solar System.

Exploration of comets

ESA has a long history of exploring comets, beginning with their Giotto mission to comet Halley in the 1980s, and most recently with the ground-breaking Rosetta mission, which was the first spacecraft to land on a comet in 2014.

It is hoped that the Comet Interceptor mission will enable scientists to get, for the first time, a glimpse of a pristine fragment left over from the formation of our Solar System, or possibly even a visiting comet from another star entirely before the heat of the Sun erodes its surface.

Comet flyby

As this mission will involve making the first visit to a ‘new’ comet coming into the inner Solar System, to do this, it has to do something very unconventional in space exploration – it has to be designed and launched before its target is discovered. This makes a comet flyby, already a challenging manoeuvre, an even more difficult mission.

Comet Interceptor does this by hitching a ride into space with the Ariel space telescope, which ESA selected last year to study the atmospheres of planets orbiting around distant stars. This telescope will go to place in space where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun balance to produce a stable parking location. In the meantime, astronomers on Earth will make use of the powerful new Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction in Chile, to scan the sky for an incoming comet in the right orbit. When it is found, ESA will calculate a trajectory for the spacecraft to intercept it, and Comet Interceptor will fly past the comet at high speed, returning images and measurements of the comet’s composition to Earth.

Collection of data

Comet Interceptor is actually three spacecraft in one – as it approaches the comet it will release smaller probes. These small probes will make a daring close approach to the comet’s icy nucleus, braving a high speed encounter with the dust and gas spewing from the comet, which at the likely speeds involved (up to 80 km/s) is like flying through a hail of bullets. The probes will send back data to the main spacecraft at a safer distance, which will relay the results back to scientists on Earth, along with the measurements made by its own long range instruments. The main spacecraft and one of the smaller probes will be provided by ESA, with the Japanese space agency JAXA providing the other small probe, reusing some of the technology they are using in their current asteroid mission, Hayabusa 2. 

International collaboration

This mission is led by scientists from University College London, Dr Colin Snodgrass from the School of Physics and Astronomy and an international team from Europe, Japan and the USA. 

Dr Snodgrass recently joined the university as part of the ‘City Region Deal’ investment in Data Driven Innovation and is based at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

He reported:

The announcement of this mission is incredibly exciting, and comes at just the right time as we seek to establish a new research group in comet science in Edinburgh. The mission will be a focus for these activities, which will also provide opportunities to collaborate with other researchers in space-related areas across the university, and with the booming local space industry around the city and across Scotland.

The IfA is already leading UK contributions to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will be necessary to discover an approaching comet with enough warning time for the mission to reach it.

Photo: Comet Interceptor concept (credit: ESA)

The Royal Astronomical Society has awarded The Michael Penston Thesis Prize 2018 to Dr Amon for her thesis entitled ‘Cosmology with the Kilo-Degree Lensing Survey’.

Alexandra completed her undergraduate and PhD at the School of Physics and Astronomy after growing up on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. She was advised by Prof. Catherine Heymans. Since then she has been working as a Kavli Fellow at Stanford University/SLAC, USA. There she spends her time working as part of the Dark Energy Survey toward the highest-precision weak lensing analysis to date. This analysis is a team effort geared towards testing the model that describes our Universe and shedding insights into dark matter and dark energy.

The Royal Astronomical Society presents several awards, medals and prizes as part of its remit to support and encourage scientists working in the fields of astronomy and geophysics. The Michael Penston Prize for the best doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics is awarded annually. 

The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation was set up in 1977 to commemorate and celebrate the work of the Scottish physicist and to promote and disseminate knowledge relating to physics, engineering and related fields.

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879) formulated the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, bringing together for the first-time electricity and magnetism. He showed that light is a form of electromagnetic radiation.  Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism are the basis for developments in many fields, such as electricity, magnetism, electronics, radio, television, radar and mobile communications.

The James Clerk Maxwell Foundation’s home is Maxwell’s place of birth: 14 India Street, Edinburgh. Visitors are welcome to view scientific and historical information, scientific equipment and family photographs.

Maxwell undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh, after which he completed his degree at the University of Cambridge. He was appointed a Professor at Marischal College Aberdeen, and subsequently at King’s College London. He was the first Director of the Cavendish Laboratory, but sadly died of stomach cancer whilst in that post.

Former staff members of the School of Physics and Astronomy, Dr Richard Dougal, Prof Malcolm Longair and Prof Alan Shotter are also trustees of the Foundation, and trustee Dr John Arthur completed his PhD at the School of Physics and Astronomy. Prof Emeritus Peter Higgs is Honorary Patron of the Foundation.

An EPSRC grant has been secured to find out how dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria differ from less dangerous antibiotic-sensitive ones.

The development by bacteria of resistance to antibiotics (antimicrobial resistance) is a global challenge that threatens to undermine many of the advances of modern medicine, with consequential massive human and financial costs. The emergence of resistant bacteria is a complex problem, and tackling it requires interdisciplinary science.

Researchers led by the University of Sheffield have been awarded an EPSRC Building Collaboration at the Physics of Life Interface grant for work on the physics of antimicrobial resistance. The research programme brings together quantitative experimental and mathematical physics with cutting-edge microbiology, biochemistry and infectious disease biology.

Rosalind Allen, who works at the School of Physics and Astronomy leads Edinburgh’s involvement with the team commented:

Our research aims to find out how dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria differ from less dangerous antibiotic-sensitive ones. Specifically, we will measure how their physical properties differ, and how their internal physiological processes differ. In this way we aim to discover hidden vulnerabilities of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be exploited in smart treatment strategies.

The Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship supports promising female astronomers early in their careers.

Dr Anna Lisa Varri

Dr Varri works at the interface between astronomy, physics, and applied mathematics, specialising in the study of some of the most ancient structures in the Universe: globular clusters - dense groups of about a million stars emerged the dawn of the formation of galaxies. Her investigations have unveiled an unexpected degree of dynamical richness in these stellar systems and has brought a new, more realistic, perspective on their classical paradigm.

The new European space observatory Gaia can now observe these stellar systems with unprecedented detail and LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) has detected gravitational waves from merging binary black holes, possibly formed in dense cluster cores. A revolution in our understanding of these building blocks of our universe has therefore started. With a combination of applied mathematics techniques and numerical simulations, Anna Lisa studies how this new-generation data can shed light on three big questions in modern astrophysics: the origin of the first stellar aggregates, the existence of intermediate-mass black holes, and the nature of dark matter. 

She is a current recipient of an inaugural UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders award, is author of more than 30 papers, has initiated collaborations across disciplines with leading groups internationally, and is passionate about mentoring and public outreach.

Her Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture will be on ‘Small stellar systems, big astrophysical questions’.

The Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship

The William Herschel Society, in association with the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), established the Caroline Herschel Prize Lectureship in 2018.  Siblings William, Caroline, and Alexander Herschel were astronomers in the early 19^th century.    The Prize Lectureship was set up to celebrate Caroline’s memory by supporting promising female astronomers early in their careers. Caroline started out as William’s assistant, but in time became recognised as an important astronomer in her own right, was the first to be paid as such, and was awarded the RAS Gold Medal in 1828.

From 3-7 June 2019, Edinburgh welcomes hundreds of scientists from around the world for the International Soft Matter Conference (ISMC).

Held under the auspices of the SoftComp Network of Excellence, whose mission is to provide a sustainable environment for the integration of leading European research groups in the field of soft matter composites, this Edinburgh meeting is the fifth in a triennial series that is now well established as a main international conference in this interdisciplinary field.

Soft matter scientists study ‘goo’ of all kinds. Familiar examples range from shampoo and toothpaste through molten chocolate and bread dough to paints and potter’s clay. All are liquids with ‘bits’ dispersed in them, which gives them interesting, and highly applicable, flow properties – non-drip paint is a good example (is it a solid or a liquid?!). Soft matter science underpins the industrial formulation of such products, which contribute around £180 billion annually to the UK economy alone. Moreover, living things are essentially built from forms of soft matter come alive, so that a significant number of soft matter scientists work on biological and medical topics. In particular, the way biological molecules assemble themselves into cells has proved to be a major inspiration to soft matter science, with many researchers focussing on mimicking biological self assembly to invent new materials. The programme of the 2019 conference reflects this huge diversity.

With successful conferences held previously in Grenoble (France, 2016), Rome (Italy, 2013), Granada (Spain, 2010) and Aachen (Germany, 2007), the spotlight is now on Edinburgh. Hosted by the School of Physics and Astronomy, its main organiser is Wilson Poon, who holds one of the most ancient chairs in the University, that of Natural Philosophy.  Professor Poon said:

With all that is happening on the political scene, we in Edinburgh welcome this opportunity to demonstrate that the UK remains open and welcoming for international science.

Edinburgh, which already hosts one of the largest public science and technology festivals in Europe and with its rich history of leadership in science, will be at the forefront of international scientific exchange during the week when over 500 scientists descend onto the city to discuss goo galore!