Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

News

  • A successful year of outreach and public engagement The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation has completed another successful year of outreach and public engagement, interacting with over 10,000 school pupils and members of the public in the 2014/15 academic year. Photographs from many of these events can be found on the ICG facebook page. Over the year, members of the ICG worked with pupils ...
  • Portsmouth Physics scores 100% for student satisfaction Physics and Astronomy at Portsmouth has scored 100% for overall student satisfaction in the 2015 National Student Survey results released today. This is the second year in a row that undergraduate physics at the University of Portsmouth has hit the maximum score. The survey asks final year students across the UK to give feedback on the quality of ...
  • Former PhD student wins Royal Astronomical Society Thesis Prize Warm congratulations to Dr. Guido W. Pettinari who has won the Michael Penston Thesis Prize, awarded by the Royal Astronomical Society for the best doctoral thesis in astronomy or astrophysics in 2014. His thesis was titled, “The intrinsic bispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background.” The prize was announced in the August 2015 A ...
  • Ogden Schools Physicist of the Year 2014/15 On Wednesday 15th July 2015, the second annual Portsmouth Ogden Schools Physicist of the Year (SPOTY) awards ceremony for Year 9 and Year 12 students was held at the University of Portsmouth. This year 23 talented young physicists from schools and colleges across the region were put forward for the award by their teachers, who ...
  • ICG welcomes back PhD students for graduation The ICG was delighted to be able to welcome back four recent PhD students for their graduation yesterday. Dr Angela Burden, Dr Dominic Galliano, Dr Oliver Steele, Dr Tim Higgs, and Dr Rafal Szepietowski received their degrees in a ceremony which also saw Portsmouth local Professor Jim Al-Khalili recognised with an honorary degree for his ...
  • Think Bigger 2015 This news item was written by Year 12 student Louis Forsyth from Bishop Luffa School, while on work experience at the ICG.  On Thursday 16th July 2015, 40 secondary school pupils came to the University of Portsmouth for a “Think Bigger” workshop led by members of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. The morning of talks ...
  • ICG enjoys summer of many visitors On June 30th, the ICG peaked in the number of summer visitors within our ranks, with nearly 20 people enjoying our hospitality and working closely with ICG researchers on a range of projects. Visitors included a number of well-known scientists from across the world, summer students and work placement pupils. The photo above shows a majority ...
  • Dr Karen Masters promoted to Reader The ICG is pleased to announce that Dr Karen Masters has been promoted to Reader in the latest round of annual promotions by the university. Karen uses information from large surveys of the sky to search for clues about how galaxies formed and evolve over cosmic time. This includes information on the shapes and types of ...
  • Work Experience Students at the ICG This week the ICG has had a large number of visitors, including 5 young people from local schools spending a week’s work experience learning what it’s like to be a research cosmologists or astrophysicist. Here is the group of students with their supervisors on the ICG balcony.  
  • Five Unimpressive Images From Space (And Why They’re Actually Amazing) The below article was written by Dr. Jen Gupta (the ICG Outreach Officer) and appears in the Huffington Post this week: “Five Unimpressive Images From Space (And Why They’re Actually Amazing)”. The Hubble Deep field was one of the images Jen selected to write about.
  • ICG lecturer nominated for a Teaching Award for Impact. Claudia Maraston has been nominated by anonymous 3rd year Math and Applied Physics students for a Teaching Award in the session ‘Overall Impact”. The nomination says: “She is very competent and enthusiastic about the subject she is teaching us, throughout this year she has made a real impact to my studies”.
  • Inaugural Lecture for Professor Crittenden ICG’s newest Professor of Cosmology, Rob Crittenden, gave his inaugural lecture on Wednesday 13th May to an audience of invited guests and members of the public. In his talk, “First Light: the cosmic microwave background”, Professor Crittenden explained how studying the oldest light in the Universe, emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang, helps us to understand ...
  • ICG Outreach Officer Highly Commended as an Asian Women of Achievement Dr. Jennifer Gupta, the ICG/SEPNet/Ogden Physic Outreach Officer, was highly commended last night at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards Dinner, held at the Hilton Park Lane, London. This success follows her shortlisting in the “Young Achievers” category which was announced last month. This AWA category recognises the talents of rising stars in the UK across all ...
  • ICG outreach officer shortlisted for achievement award A University of Portsmouth astrophysicist has been shortlisted for an Asian Women of Achievement Award. Dr Jen Gupta, the SEPnet/Ogden outreach officer from the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG), has been nominated for the ‘Young Achiever’ award, which recognises the talents of rising stars in the UK across all sectors. The awards, co-founded in 1999 by Pinky ...
  • Mapping the dark side of the cosmos An international team of scientists, including from the UK’s University of Portsmouth, today released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. The maps, created with one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail, and will improve our understanding of dark ...
  • ICG engages with thousands of members of the public in March Members of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation were extremely busy in March 2015, making astrophysics and cosmology accessible to the public through a variety of ways from events to TV appearances. Dancing in the Dark – The End of Physics? ICG Director Professor Bob Nichol featured in an episode of Horizon about dark matter and dark ...
  • Physics final year project carried out at ICG wins prize Third-year Applied Physics student Joakim Carlsen wins the prize for best poster and project, entitled ‘Detecting Massive Galaxies at High Redshift Using the Dark Energy Survey’ carried out at the ICG supervised by Dr Daniel Thomas. The project was a great team effort with ICG researchers Xan Morice-Atkinson, Dr Diego Capozzi, and James Etherington contributing ...
  • Dining in history: ICG scientist elected member of RAS Club. Professor Claudia Maraston has been elected member or the Royal Astronomical Society Club, an inner circle of scientists that was founded in 1820 and counts its members since. Claudia Maraston is member 424 and was elected by Professors Joe Silk and Roger Davies. Several early scientific societies in Britain had their origins as a dining club, ...
  • Over 100 school children attend Stargazing for Schools 2015 On Wednesday 28th January 2015, over 100 primary school children from Portsmouth and the surrounding areas attended the second annual Stargazing for Schools event at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. The event was organised by the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation and HMS Warrior 1860, with support from the University of Southampton and Action Stations. Over ...
  • Launch of the Portsmouth “Girls into Physics” Network Last night saw the first event for the newly form Portsmouth (and surroundings) “Girls into Physics” network. This is a new initiative set up by the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation to encourage and support girls and young women studying physics in Portsmouth and the surrounding areas. Our first event saw girls studying Physics at AS level ...
  • Cosmologists prepare to make atlas of Universe Reposted from the University of Portsmouth News: Cosmologists from the University of Portsmouth are among those preparing to make the biggest map of the Universe ever created. Scientists from Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation are part of an international team setting out their plans for the giant cosmic atlas to be made by sweeping the sky ...
  • SKA Cosmology Science Book Chapters released Today, Cosmology and Synergy chapters of the new Square Kilometre Array Science Book were released at arXiv.org. These include chapters written and co-authored by ICG researchers Roy Maartens (University of Western Cape and Portsmouth, chair of the SKA Cosmology Science Working Group), David Bacon, Gong-bo Zhao and Alkistis Pourtsidou. Chapters with Portsmouth contributions include: Cosmology with ...
  • UK astronomers share bounty of new information Reposted from University of Portsmouth News. Scientists from Portsmouth today marked the end of a major era in a massive worldwide astronomical project which has so far mapped millions of stars and galaxies. Fourteen cosmologists from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation have played a major role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) ...
  • REF2014: Portsmouth Research Excellence in Physics 96% of the University of Portsmouth’s physics research outputs have been judged world-leading or internationally excellent in the national Research Excellence Framework 2014. The Times Higher Education ranks Portsmouth 8th in their league table for physics research outputs.. Overall 89% of Portsmouth physics research outputs, impact and environment was rated as world-leading or internationally excellent. Portsmouth’s overall research ...
  • ICG PhD student named the Institute of Physics 2014 Early Career Physics Communicator Claire Le Cras, a third year PhD student at the ICG, has won the Institute of Physics 2014 Early Career Physics Communicator Award. As reported last week, Claire was nominated for her public engagement and outreach work, in particular her innovative project explaining astrophysical concepts through dance. At the final judging and prizegiving for the award ...
  • ICG members at international conference in honour of Prof Massimo Capaccioli ICG members Claudia Maraston, Daniel Thomas, Diego Capozzi, and James Etherington have been invited to attend and present their work at the international conference ‘The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys’ http://astrofisica.na.infn.it/udsnaples held in Naples this week to celebrate the 70th birthday and distinguished career of Massimo Capaccioli. Prof Capaccioli built the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile, ...
  • ICG PhD student shortlisted for communication award A PhD research student at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation has been shortlisted for the 2014 Institute of Physics Early Career Physics Communicator Award. Claire Le Cras, who is in the third year of her PhD working on stellar populations under the supervision of Professor Claudia Maraston and Dr Daniel Thomas, was nominated ...
  • ICG researcher edited a focus issue for Classical and Quantum Gravity ICG researcher Kazuya Koyama edited the focus issue “Relativistic effects in cosmology” for Classical and Quantum Gravity. This focus issue summarises recent developments in computing relativistic effects in cosmology. The issue consists of two parts. The first part examines general relativistic formulations of the observed over-density of galaxies and the second part discusses relativistic effects on ...
  • ICG research sheds new light on the dark sector New research offers a novel insight into the nature of dark matter and dark energy and what the future of our Universe might be. Researchers in Portsmouth and Rome have found hints that dark matter, the cosmic scaffolding on which our Universe is built, is being slowly erased, swallowed up by dark energy. The findings appear this ...
  • ICG Astronomer wins Women of the Future award 2014 A University of Portsmouth astronomer has won the Women of the Future Science award on the same day she took part in the BBC’s 100 Women – a day of debate, discussion and live broadcasting at BBC’s Broadcasting House from inspiring women around the world. Dr Karen Masters, a senior lecturer from the University’s Institute of ...
  • ICG astronomers bag another superluminous supernova ICG supernova hunters Chris D’Andrea, Andreas Papadopoulos and Bob Nichol have found the second superluminous supernova in the second year of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) data. The object shown below was identified by graduate student Andreas Papadopoulos and triggered for confirmation using the largest telescopes in the world including Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC),  MMT and Keck. ...
  • Jury prize to Oscar Ramos Oscar Ramos visited ICG  from Ecole Polytechnique  few months ago, to do his master thesis  on a strange theory of dark energy where the photon is driving cosmic acceleration.  Back to Paris,  he baffled all the local experts, and managed to win a special jury prize  for his final essay.  Below is an extract from ...
  • First Astrodome outing of the new academic year On Friday 17th October, the ICG Outreach Officer, Dr Jen Gupta, and PhD Student Outreach Rep, Jimmy Tarr, took the Portsmouth Astrodome to Charter Academy for its first outing of the new academic year. Pupils from years 7-11 attended shows inside the Astrodome, where they watched the fulldome movie We Are Astronomers (a production of ...
  • ICG scientist in the ALMA science assessing team. Claudia Maraston will be part of the science assessor team of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, the largest radio telescope on Earth, located in the Atacama desert, Chile, at 5000 m above the sea level (www.almaobservatory.org). ALMA is an international partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia, whose science target is the understanding ...
  • Inaugural Lecture for Professor Maraston Claudia Maraston, one of the ICG’s new professors, gave her inaugural lecture yesterday to members of the public. Her talk “Shining Galaxies in a Dark Universe” explained her work on understanding the light from the hundreds of billions of stars that make up galaxies. The fully booked lecture explained how stars generate their energy, and ...
  • ICG astronomer shortlisted for Women of the Future award A University of Portsmouth astronomer has once again been shortlisted for the Women of the Future Science award. Dr Karen Masters, a senior lecturer from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, has been nominated for her research into understanding how galaxies form and evolve in our universe. Karen will talk about her current work and ...
  • Evidence of gravity waves clouded by interstellar dust ICGs own Prof. Rob Crittenden has written this popular article for The Conversation: Evidence of gravity waves clouded by interstellar dust in which he discusses the BICEP2 evidence for gravity waves in the early Universe in light of recent results from Planck which suggest the detection is consistent with interstellar dust.  
  • ICG Hosts “Zoocon” Wiki-a-thon This Saturday, members of the ICG hosted a “Zoocon” event for dedicated Zooniverse volunteers (or “Zooites”). The theme of the day was a “wiki-a-thon” to learn about editing wikipedia and discuss the coverage of citizen science and citizen science projects in the online encyclopaedia. We were grateful to have on hand Mike Peel (Manchester), an ...
  • Nuffield Student Placement at ICG This summer, A-level physics student, Matilda Smith-Cornwall, from Peter Symonds College in Winchester spent several weeks working on a research project at ICG through the Nuffield Research Placement Scheme. Matilda worked on a project looking at how the strength of spiral arms (as identified in the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project) correlate with the star formation ...
  • Most read MNRAS papers in July Two GalaxyZoo papers involving current ICG researchers Edd Edmondson, Karen Masters, Bob Nichol and Daniel Thomas featured in the top 5 most read papers of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) for last month (July 2014). The papers were: “Galaxy Zoo: bars in disc galaxies” by Masters et al. (2011) was ranked first (most ...
  • A year of cosmic wonder A year of cosmic wonder The Dark Energy Survey (DES) starts its second season and releases data and images from its first season. UoP News item: http://www.port.ac.uk/uopnews/2014/08/18/a-year-of-cosmic-wonders/ Official FNAL press release: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2014/Dark-Energy-Survey-20140818.html Cool DES images and videos: http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/2014/Dark-Energy-Survey-20140818-images.html        
  • HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING (HPC) Sciama2, the new supercomputer, is now running as an autonomous environment in parallel with the original Sciama. At the moment user accounts, applications, libraries and data are being transferred to the new machine. Jobs are currently running in both environments but in October the old Sciama will be updated (Operating Systems, Firmware etc) and merged ...
  • 2014 ICG Graduands Congratulations to all our 2014 graduates. Jon Emery, Taichi Kidani and Hana Schumacher attended the University of Portsmouth graduation ceremony in the Guildhall to receive their Doctor of Philosophy awards from the university Vice-Chancellor, Prof Graham Galbraith, resplendent in their red, purple and silver gowns. The university graduation ceremonies have brought several thousand graduates, friends ...
  • Ogden Trust Schools Physicist of the Year 2013/14 Last week eleven promising year 9 and year 12 physics students were named ‘Portsmouth Schools Physicist of the Year’ for 2013/14 in an awards ceremony at the University of Portsmouth. The students were nominated by their teachers for their hard work, contributions in class and progress made in physics over the school year. The award-winning ...
  • The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Expands Its Reach Building on 14 years of extraordinary discoveries, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) today officially launched a major program of three new surveys, adding novel capabilities to expand its census of the Universe into regions it had been unable to explore before.   Read the press release announcing the exciting new development on the New SDSS Website. Staff at ...
  • Students visit ICG Five  high school students spent the first week of July to do a work internship at ICG.  Welcomed by the usual friendly atmosphere of our institute, they made their  first scientific  research experience, working in the same way as our local PhD students. They did projects with ICG supervisors, took part to special  seminars tailored ...
  • NAM 2014 a great success The Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting 2014 (NAM2014) finished last week and was a great success. Along with the news from the conference that can be found on the website, the University of Portsmouth made this short video of some of the highlights of the conference: National Astronomy Meeting 2014 from University of Portsmouth on ...
  • ICG Team Wins NAM 2014 Football Tournament   ‘ICG Cosmos’ has won this years National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) Football Tournament during a evening of action and excitement this week. ICG took part as hosts along with 7 other teams (representing 10 astronomy departments in total) on Monday at HMS Temeraire as part of a packed NAM social programme. The tournament was split into two ...
  • The Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV takes off! The Executive Committee of the international collaboration SDSS-IV (http://www.sdss3.org/future/), directed by Mike Blanton (NYU) and comprising eight international members including Claudia Maraston from the ICG, reached the goal to achieve the required funding to start the SDSS-IV mission. The Exec met every week since November 2013 to discuss and push several agreements with different institutions ...
  • A Physics Teacher’s View of Visiting ICG For size weeks this summer (Monday June 2nd-Friday July 11th), ICG is playing host to Physics Teacher, Mr Jeremy Thomas from Portsmouth Grammar School. While he his here Mr Thomas will help review the ICG outreach activities, participate in some events which are happening during this time, and will also work on his own research ...

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