She’s especially fond of writing about space and physics, and loves sharing the weird wonders of the universe with anyone who wants to listen. The line where the light side meets the dark side of the Moon is called the terminator, and it’s the best place to look for craters. Tereza is a London-based science and technology journalist, aspiring fiction writer and amateur gymnast. Originally from Prague, the Czech Republic, she spent the first seven years of her career working as a reporter, script-writer and presenter for various TV programmes of the Czech Public Service Television. She later took a career break to pursue further education and added a Master’s in Science from the International Space University, France, to her Bachelor’s in Journalism and Master’s in Cultural Anthropology from Prague’s Charles University. She worked as a reporter at the Engineering and Technology magazine, freelanced for a range of publications including Live Science, Space.com, Professional Engineering, Via Satellite and Space News and served as a maternity cover science editor at the European Space Agency.

We are also leaders in advanced retrieval techniques for extracting atmospheric structure and composition from astronomical observations. Simulations have covered the range of planets from uninhabitable terrestrial planets such as lava planets, through habitable-zone terrestrial planets, and up through sub-Neptunes and hot and ultra-hot Jupiters and brown dwarfs. Pioneering work on long-term atmospheric evolution and habitability has been done at the interface of astrophysical, atmospheric and geochemistry disciplines. It is a perfect tool for those interested in undertaking a hands-on research project in astrophysics. The astrophysics group study the formation of stars and planets, the evolution of single and binary stars, exploiting high-time resolution instrumentation. It also investigates the most energetic events in the Universe, including supernovae, active galaxies, and their impact on galaxy evolution.

Careers in astrophysics

Durham University is one of the UK’s leading centres for astronomicalresearch with world-class groups working in a wide range of fieldscovering the observational, theoretical and instrumentation aspects ofastronomy. For observational work we use a wide range of facilities worldwide in addition to those we have been involved in building. Locally we operate the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory a few miles outside Cambridge, where we have developed world-class telescopes including the Ryle Telescope, the Cambridge Optical Aperture Synthesis Telescope (COAST) and the Very Small Array. The VSA is a telescope for studying the CMB and was developed jointly with Jodrell Bank and the IAC Tenerife (where it is now located). The telescopes at Lord’s Bridge have now been joined by the Arcminute MicroKelvin Imager (AMI), which images the CMB at high resolution.

• One of the most fascinating questions in modern day Astronomy is how stars and their planetary systems form.
• This photo represents 342.5 hours of data collected by 19 amateur astroimagers with telescopes ranging from a 2.8 inches to 12 inches in aperture.
• The corresponding DigiKit includes a collection of relevant simulations, videos/animations, and other teacher resources for background that can help to teach the content in the primary lesson.

Best Places To Get Astrophysics Research

As SEPs arrive at Earth, they constitute a radiation hazard to humans and technology in space and high-latitude flights. This Space Weather hazard is included in the UK National Risk Register and understanding and seeking to forecast SEP events are part of mitigating the Space Weather risk to humanity. This current project applies our new stellar libraries to make measurements from galaxy spectra. Your work will involve programming, data analysis and plotting of diagnostic diagrams to compare different samples of galaxies. Our understanding of galaxy evolution is undergoing rapid changes thanks to new surveys of galaxies. More accurate modelling of https://jamesgeach.com/ spectroscopic observations is an important aspect for improving our understanding by learning the most from observations.

The pair’s macabre colours represent a combination of mid-infrared light from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope with visible and ultraviolet light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The long, ghastly “stare” of their searing eye-like cores shines out into the supreme cosmic darkness. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021, represents the pinnacle of this eternal endeavor that started thousands of years ago and grew from humble beginnings. Yet, the more astronomers see, the more questions are arising and the answers to the grand questions of the nature of the universe and our place in it remain elusive. Within a decade, astronomers realized that these nebulas were speeding away from Earth the faster the farther away they were, according to Science News. This discovery led to the idea that the universe was expanding probably from the time of a giant explosion that had created it in the most distant past.

Astronomy is the study of stars, planets, comets, galaxies, space and anything else outside of the Earth and its atmosphere. The advent of photography in the 19th century simplified the charting of the night sky and the stellar position catalogs quickly grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands of stars, according to ESA. The first photographs of the moon and sun were published in the 1840s followed by the images of the first star, Vega, about a decade later. Aristarchus of Samos made the first (highly inaccurate) attempt to calculate the distance of Earth to the sun and moon, and Hipparchus sometimes considered the father of empirical astronomy, cataloged the positions of over 800 stars using just the naked eye. He also developed the brightness scale that is still in use today, according to ESA.

A research project is not necessarily rigid and may evolve as it develops, and as you develop your understanding. If you have an idea for a new project and think one of our academics is a good fit to supervise it, please contact them. Our academic contact details can be found on their staff profiles, linked in the project titles below. We are made up of academic and research staff as well as postgraduate research students. We’re exploring the inflation of the very early Universe, the impact of dark energy on its geometry and developing tests to monitor its expansion. The School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester combines world-class scientific research with an environment of excellence in Physics teaching and learning. Around the autumn time each year we advertise studentships and we are also keen to attract candidates for fellowships.

Our activities in these areas embrace the confrontation between observation and theory and the development of instrumentation and technology, such as cm-wave technology and big data/exascale astronomy, where the group is taking a leading role within the SKA telescope project. Our research programme on galaxy formation and evolution spans their structure and history, from the local Milky Way to the highest redshift galaxies. Galactic dynamics underpins much of our work, understanding the dynamical processes that have led to those distributions, particularly in our own galaxy, with emphasis on the distribution of baryonic and dark matter in galaxies, and in determining the masses of nuclear black holes. We have guaranteed access to JWST’s near-infrared multi-object spectrograph NIRSpec (including its IFS capability), which will reveal the nascent stages of galaxies as they first form stars and black holes in their dark haloes. Our research programmes in theoretical astrophysics studies the key physical processes which govern the evolution of the Universe. These can be broadly described as «accretion processes» and «dynamics», but these broad themes have applications across a very wide range of physical systems, from exoplanets, to super-massive black holes, to galaxies. The complex nature of these processes means that much of our work involves large-scale numerical simulations, and as a result the School is host to one node of the UK’s DiRAC high-performance computing facility.

Astrology is widely considered to be a pseudoscience that attempts to explain how the position and motion of celestial objects such as planets affect people and events on Earth. Astronomy is the scientific study of the universe using mathematics, physics, and chemistry. A large observing program of the James Webb Space Telescope has recently provided the first comprehensive view of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), the small primitive bodies of the outer solar system, orbiting beyond Neptune, from which some comets originate. Observations of 59 objects obtained with the NIRSpec instrument have been analyzed by an international research team involving the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale. The infrared spectra reveal the first-ever detections of CO₂ and CO ices on small bodies in the outer solar system. The corresponding DigiKit includes a collection of relevant simulations, videos/animations, and other teacher resources for background that can help to teach the content in the primary lesson.