Colleagues from the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit involved in Gaia space telescope discovery, which challenges our understanding of how massive stars develop and evolve.
Gaia discovery
Scientists working on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope have uncovered a ‘sleeping’ giant: a large black hole, with a mass of nearly 33 times the mass of the Sun, hiding in the constellation Aquila, less than 2000 light-years from Earth.
This is the first time a black hole of stellar origin this big has been spotted so close to home, which will enable detailed follow up by the astronomical community.
The discovery challenges our understanding of how massive stars develop and evolve.
Black holes
Matter in a black hole is so densely packed that nothing can escape its immense gravitational pull, not even light. The great majority of stellar-mass black holes that we know of are gobbling up matter from a nearby star companion. The captured material falls onto the collapsed object at high speed, becoming extremely hot and releasing X-rays. These systems belong to a family of celestial objects named X-ray binaries.
When a black hole does not have a companion close enough to steal matter from, it does not generate any light and is extremely difficult to spot. These black holes are called ‘dormant’.
Wide-Field Astronomy Unit
The Gaia team at the Institute for Astronomy’s Wide-Field Astronomy Unit are excited to have contributed to this discovery of a large black-hole within our Galaxy. The team have been deeply involved in the development and operation of the mission since 2007, with work falling into three main strands, all of which have played a part in this discovery.
Much of their effort is devoted to the detailed characterisation of the spacecraft, telescopes and detectors that is required to achieve the extreme precision and reliability delivered by the mission. For instance, models of the Point Spread Function (the 'prescription' of the telescope optics) are provided by the team. These calibrations are then used to obtain position and brightness measurements for each of the star observations used in Gaia Data Release 4, of which there are around 2 trillion.
The team also work on the Big Data tools required by the wider network of Gaia colleagues and scientific community in order to explore the Milky Way.
This black-hole discovery is based on the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit’s astrometric position measurements; improvements since the previous Data Release 3 have allowed the characteristic wobble to be uncovered.
Future plans
This dormant black hole is the third found with Gaia and was aptly named ‘Gaia BH3’. Its discovery is exciting because of the mass of the object: much remains to be investigated on the origin of black holes as large as Gaia BH3.
It is encouraging to see the efforts from the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit and wider collaboration come to fruition, and more will be learned as the mission continues.
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Congratulations to Professors Marialuisa Aliotta and Annette Ferguson who have received European Research Council Advanced grants.
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced recipients of its Advanced Grants. These grants are aimed at established, leading principal investigators who are seeking funding to pursue ground-breaking, ambitious projects. The recipients of the grants have a track-record of significant research achievements, and will use the funds to form teams of postdoctoral researchers and PhD students to pursue their research ideas.
Professor Marialuisa Aliotta
Professor Aliotta’s research interests focus on experimental nuclear astrophysics, specifically on the investigation of nuclear reactions that occur in stars and govern their lifetimes and evolution. She is interested in exploring the processes that account for the synthesis of the chemical elements both in quiescent stars like our sun and in explosive scenarios like novae, supernovae, and X-ray bursts.
The grant – NUCLEAR (NUclear CLustering Effects in Astrophysical Reactions) - will be used to tackle three long standing questions in astrophysics: the cosmological lithium problem, nucleosynthesis in first stars, and the electron screening puzzle. Despite appearing to be unrelated, these questions may all be reconciled by the quantum effect of nuclear clustering. By adopting a synergistic approach of experimental, theoretical, and computational effort, Professor Aliotta and her team will break new ground in elucidating the role and strength of nuclear clustering in astrophysical reactions, with far-reaching consequences in nuclear physics, cosmology, and astrophysics.
Professor Aliotta commented:
I am delighted to have been awarded this ERC Grant and very much look forward to collaborating with leading experts Dr Guillaume Hupin (IJCL, France), Dr James deBoer (ND, US), and Dr Marco Pignatari (Konkoly, Hungary) towards tackling some of the most intriguing issues of modern nuclear astrophysics.
Professor Annette Ferguson
Professor Ferguson’s research focuses on understanding how galaxies form and evolve through observational analyses of their structures, kinematics and stellar contents. Her primary focus is on nearby spiral galaxies which resemble our own Milky Way.
Her ERC grant will make breakthroughs in understanding how galaxies assemble through conducting in-depth studies of their faint peripheral regions. These remote parts contain a gold mine of information about galaxy formation but have been previously inaccessible due to their extreme faintness. Leveraging new and forthcoming data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, Professor Ferguson will assemble a team to search galaxy outskirts for ancient stars and the ghostly remnants of destroyed dwarf galaxies. The findings will be compared to state-of-the-art computer simulations to reveal the missing physics in the current galaxy formation paradigm.
Colleagues are saddened by the loss of renowned physicist Professor Peter Higgs who has died, aged 94, after a short illness.
Professor Peter Higgs is best known for predicting the existence of a fundamental physical particle that came to bear his name. He was a researcher at the University in 1964 when he published a paper proposing a mechanism for how particles acquire mass. Key to this mechanism was a particle that subsequently became known as the Higgs boson.
Nearly 50 years later, in 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland announced the discovery of this particle. This led to the award of a Nobel Prize for Physics for Professor Higgs and Professor Francois Englert in 2013.
Professor Higgs passed away peacefully at home on 8 April 2024 following a short illness.
Early years
Professor Higgs was born on 29 May 1929 in Newcastle upon Tyne. He studied Theoretical Physics at King's College London and gained his PhD in 1954. He was appointed Lecturer in Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh in 1960 and became Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1980.
The Higgs Mechanism
Professor Higgs’s renowned work in theoretical particle physics, published in 1964, elucidated the mechanism by which the known fundamental particles acquire their mass. His work inspired experimental endeavours to find the particle predicted by this mechanism - the so-called Higgs boson - which led to its discovery in 2012 and his subsequent award of a Nobel Prize, along with Francois Englert. Together with Brout, they devised the theory of the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism which invokes a field permeating all of space with which particles interact in order acquire mass. This field would have an associated particle, the Higgs boson, that would eventually be the last discovered particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics, completing a self-consistent picture of the fundamental particles, albeit with many clues that more may lie beyond the Standard Model. The impact of this work was to answer a profound question, namely how mass is given to particles. The insight that Professor Higgs had was to design a specially shaped field that would allow an interaction with other Standard Model particles and in particular to give mass to the distinctly non-zero mass W and Z bosons, inferred at that time from the short range nature of the weak force.
Experimental evidence
It is a triumph of the Standard Model and the Higgs mechanism that this particle has been demonstrated to exist, and since the discovery in 2012 at the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (including Edinburgh experimental particle physicists alongside many international colleagues), the evidence that this new boson conforms to the expectations for the Standard Model Higgs boson has only strengthened. This information comes from the rate of interaction of the Higgs boson with other particles namely the W, Z, photon bosons and the tau, bottom and top fermions (with further early evidence that this picture also holds for muons) and the fundamental quantum properties of the Higgs boson. Future measurements will be able to tell us its rate of coupling to itself and may reveal further as yet unseen interactions to the second and even first generation of fundamental particles.
Legacy
In 2012, the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh founded the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics and established the Higgs Chair for Theoretical Physics in honour of Peter’s work. The Centre works to seek answers to fundamental questions about the universe by creating opportunities for researchers and students from around the world to come together to formulate new theoretical concepts, taking us beyond the limitations of current paradigms.
In addition, in celebration of the technical achievement involved in the discovery of the Higgs boson, in 2018 the School and University, together with the UK Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), created the Higgs Centre for Innovation, which is located at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. The aim for the Higgs Centre for Innovation is to build not only on the technologies being developed for CERN but also for the European Space Agency, and the UK Space Agency by encouraging the establishment and growth of new high-technology companies.
Both Higgs Centres have gone from strength to strength, expanding dramatically over the last few years. As a result, Professor Higgs's legacy lives on and will have an impact far beyond his key individual contribution for many years to come.
Professor Higgs is remembered as a kind and humble colleague as well as an excellent and enthusiastic lecturer to generations of students. Edinburgh is proud to have him among its academic staff where his Nobel Prize was, and still is, cause for great celebration.
Image credit: Peter Tuffy / University of Edinburgh
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A pioneering radio astronomy project, introducing skills and expertise to countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, has received a funding boost to continue its transformational work.
The Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) project has already trained more than 300 students and postgraduates in eight countries since its launch eight years ago.
The new £6.5m cash injection will help to train a further 225 people over the next three years, equipping them with skills in radio astronomy and data science that they can then apply to other sectors and help address local development challenges such as water, agriculture and deforestation.
This third phase of DARA is being funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – via the International Science Partnerships Fund, in partnership with South Africa.
Training and entrepreneurship
The core of the DARA programme is intensive hands-on training in high-level computing; radio technologies; observational techniques in radio and optical astronomy; and data reduction and analysis. This will be complemented by training events and workshops in AI applications involving astronomical and Earth observation data.
The trainees also gain an understanding of potential development and entrepreneurship opportunities from DARA’s industrial partners from the space sector – all part of the project’s aspirations to do far more than simply create a new generation of radio astronomers. The aim is to develop space sector hubs with co-located services including radio telescopes, satellite downlink, and data centre facilities to foster jobs and economic opportunities.
The new phase of DARA will also fund postdoctoral fellows in the African partner institutions for the first time, in a bid to attract researchers back to their home countries. The goal is to establish local experts who can utilise the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) – the world’s biggest radio telescope which is being built in South Africa.
International collaboration
The project is led by the University of Leeds, and includes a number of partners from universities in the UK and South Africa. The University of Edinburgh joined DARA via a recent pilot project which trialled a new optical astronomy training element in Kenya, where a 40cm optical telescope was installed.
Professor Colin Snodgrass, from the School of Physics and Astronomy said:
We are very excited to be part of the DARA project and to expand the training that it offers to include optical astronomy as well as radio, so that the next generation of African astronomers are able to study the sky across all wavelengths. It is great to see our telescope at the Turkana Basin Institute, Kenya being used to train students from across Africa as part of DARA. This contributes to capacity building, locally and across the continent, and collection of valuable data on the quality of the night skies there, both of which are essential to our long term plans to develop a permanent astronomical observatory at this location.
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Investigations on the link between fluid flow and glass bending in layered systems have uncovered results which could be used to create more durable foldable smartphones.
A collaboration between the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership (ECFP) and Corning Inc. investigating the link between fluid flow and glass bending in layered systems has uncovered that shear-thinning fluids provide better protection against impact. Such insight could be used to create more durable foldable smartphones.
A new approach to analysing how solid-fluid laminates respond to impacts, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help researchers design protective smart materials for touchscreens, sports equipment, and other applications. Already in use, flexible body armour protects its wearer with a woven fabric infused with a non-Newtonian fluid that hardens on impact. While analogous smart materials like solid-fluid laminates could potentially provide impact protection for devices such as touch screens, researchers have struggled to model the complex interactions between deforming solids and the corresponding pressure-driven fluid flows that would inform their design.
Modelling and experiments
Led by Dr James Richards, researchers from ECFP worked with Dr Mike DeRosa from Corning Inc. to devise a simple scaling analysis and applied it to a laminate composed of a non-Newtonian fluid sandwiched between a flexible sheet and a rigid base layer. This is similar to a piece of glass on top of an LCD panel, in which both solid layers need to withstand sharp impacts. The theoretical approach was verified using experiments on a universal testing machine with photoelastic measurements. The experimental set-up was designed by ECFP’s Dr Rory O’Neill.
Designing smart composites
Using both numerical models and constant velocity experiments, the researchers applied and verified their approach, finding that unlike flexible body armour, a laminate with a fluid that thins upon impact delivers optimal protection for solid-fluid laminates. The study provides a new approach for designing and analysing smart solid-fluid composites with a simplified coupling between the parts.
Congratulations to Dr Christopher Stock who has received a research collaboration grant in this latest round of awards.
The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has announced its funding outcome following its 2023 Research Awards open call.
Congratulations to Dr Christopher Stock who has received a research collaboration grant along with colleagues at the University of Glasgow and Rutgers University, USA. Their funding will be used to conduct research on magnetostrictive and piezomagnetic materials for magnetoelastic harvesting devices. Dr Stock’s research interests include the application of scattering techniques to the study of strongly correlated electronic and magnetic systems.
The RSE Research Collaboration Grants are intended to encourage collaborations between disciplines and/or institutions to advance exploration of an important topic.
The RSE is an educational charity providing public benefit throughout Scotland and beyond. This round of Royal Society of Edinburgh grants totals £700,000, and covers small grants, personal research fellowships and international joint projects across a range of disciplines.
Congratulations to Somrita Ray, the School’s inaugural Elizabeth Gardner Fellow, who has been appointed in a permanent position.
Congratulations to Somrita Ray, who has recently been appointed as Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Berhampur.
As the School of Physics and Astronomy's inaugural Elizabeth Gardner Fellow, Somrita had been working on the statistical physics of resetting processes. The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship supports early-career, postdoctoral researchers in physics and astronomy to prepare themselves for future independent roles in academia and beyond. The Fellowship is aimed at candidates from backgrounds which are under-represented in the School’s academic community.
Somrita commented on her delight in her new appointment:
The IISER position will give me the ideal balance of teaching and research with students who are motivated to study Basic Sciences. The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship has given me a platform to obtain this position. It allowed me the required time to chase my dream of securing a permanent academic position while providing me with the essential resources to continue my research in the highly intellectual environment of the University of Edinburgh.
The Elizabeth Gardner Fellowship honours the outstanding achievements of Elizabeth Gardner (1957 - 1988) who studied Mathematical Physics at the University of Edinburgh and worked as a Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy. Her works on the optimal storage of neural networks have been selected as two of the most influential papers in the 50th anniversary of Journal of Physics A.
Congratulations to Jordan Marsh who has won the Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Thesis Prize.
Jordan Marsh, who was based in the Nuclear Astrophysics group within the School’s Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, has recently completed his PhD, and has won the Institute of Physics (IoP) Nuclear Physics Thesis Prize.
His research focused on the installation and commissioning of the CRYRING Array for Reaction Measurements (CARME), a charged particle detection array which is located at the CRYRING storage ring in GSI, Germany. CARME is designed to study nuclear reactions using storage rings, which is a new and unique methodology to perform nuclear physics experiments, with the aim to resolve long standing problems in astrophysics. CARME is now ready for its exciting future physics programme following its commissioning, which was completed by studying the reaction of a deuteron beam incident on a nitrogen gas target.
The Institute of Physics prize is awarded annually for exceptional work carried out as part of a PhD thesis project in the field of nuclear physics.
Study suggests how biological fluids balance motion while protecting structure.
Biology is continually driven by motor proteins and other active machinery that gives biomaterials such distinct properties. This intrinsic activity keeps living systems away from equilibrium (i.e. not dead), generates structure, and powers movement. It is known that spontaneous, collective motility naturally arises in active fluids. However, these collective flows tend to exhibit a form of disorderly ‘active turbulence’ which chaotically mixes biological materials. On the other hand, biological functionality requires that self-organised structures are protected — we wouldn’t want our internal organs to be mangled whenever we go for a stroll! So how is it that active flows can be disorderly while simultaneously preserving self-organised structure?
To investigate this, researchers from the School’s Institute for Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, along with collaborators from ESPCI Paris-Tech in France, focussed on an experimentally realisable active film composed of biological filaments (microtubules) and motor proteins (kinesin). When the motor proteins burn biochemical fuel, they actively push the filaments to orient and flow.
While most of the filaments align, the orientation field is riddled with points where the orientation is suddenly singular. These singular points are called topological defects and activity causes pairs of defects to be continually created and annihilated—similar to electron/positron pair creation/annihilation. Active systems are different in that the activity causes the positive defects to be self-motile, zipping around the system until they annihilate.
It was previously noted that self-motile defects tend to be found at the edge of vortices. However, we compared the vorticity and strain rate at each point in the film and discovered that defects are not simply found near vortex edges; rather, they are tightly constrained to be found exactly on lines where vorticity and strain rate perfectly balance. The team were able to explain this spontaneous self-constraint between defects and mesoscale coherent flow structures through the existence of ‘bend walls’ — elongated narrow kinks in the orientation, akin to Néel walls in magnets. Positive defects move along the bend walls, which themselves actively drive flows with balanced vorticity and strain rate.
The findings indicate that defects are not simply points, despite being topological singularities. Rather they are just one part of larger structures involving defects, bend walls and coherent flows. The self-constraint discovered suggests how biological systems may balance motion while protecting functional structures.
Dr Tyler Shendruk, School of Physics and Astronomy commented:
This was an exciting and fast-moving project. It started as an exploration of different ways to quantify flow structures that rapidly led to surprising results. Fortunately, we quickly established an international collaboration that involved wonderful experimentalists and other computational physicists. The collaboration tested our predictions and established just how general our conclusions are.
PhD student Louise Head, School of Physics and Astronomy said:
We are excited to see the future work that can arise from our discovery that the dynamics of topological defects are interwoven with bend walls and lines of simple shear.
Funding received to understand factors such as communicative need, social aspects and learning biases.
A collaboration involving physics and linguistics researchers has received a British Academy Talent Development Award which will be used to make new discoveries about a core aspect of human behaviour and cognition.
Professor Richard Blythe from the School of Physics and Astronomy and Professor Robert Truswell and Dr Dan Lassiter, who are both based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, have teamed up to lead the study.
The grant will support the application of methods and models from statistical physics to the historical corpora of language use to understand the origins of grammatical structure in human language.
A major roadblock in disentangling these factors lies in the sparsity of historical data: some grammatical changes unfurl over a millennium or more, and contemporaneous records dwindle as one looks further back in time.
The funding will bring together world experts in handling such data at a two-day workshop to be held at the University of Edinburgh in May. This in turn will provide the team with the knowledge they need to make future discoveries about the aspects of human behaviour and cognition that are responsible for the languages we use being structured as they are, and why very different languages can show similar structures.
The British Academy is funded by the UK government, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to support the Talent Development Awards scheme. The aim of the scheme is to promote the building of skills and capacities for current and future generations, including in core areas like quantitative skills, interdisciplinarity, data science, digital humanities and languages.