Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

News

  • 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 ...
  • Watch ICG Member on the Sky at Night ICG member, Dr. Karen Masters will make an appearance on the next episode of the Sky at Night, first airing this Sunday 8th June, 10pm on BBC4. The theme for this month’s episode (first airing Sunday 8th June) is Impacts. Dr. Masters discusses impacts on the biggest scales – the collisions of galaxies, with Sky at Night ...
  • ICG professor is recognised in the first SEPnet Public Engagement Awards ICG’s Professor Claudia Maraston has been recognised for her excellent public engagement activities in the inaugural SEPnet Public Engagement Awards. SEPnet (the South East Physics Network) has awarded prizes to 4 researchers from across their partner institutions for their exceptional contribution to engaging the public with their research, and highly commended a further 4 researchers ...
  • Space scientists visit Stamshaw Junior School. The “Visit to Space”, the outreach and educational programme designed by Claudia Maraston, Daniel Thomas and Jen Gupta of the ICG, and organised by UP for It Juniors, www.upforitjuniors.co.uk, which is part of the University’s Education Liaison and Outreach Team, visited Stamshaw Junior School in Portsmouth on May 20. The response of pupils and teachers ...
  • 2014 ICG/SEPNet Student Outreach Award We are pleased to announce that the 2014 ICG/SEPnet Postgraduate Student Outreach Award is awarded to David Wilkinson, for his significant involvement and leadership of outreach activities during his time at ICG, especially since he became the ICG Student Outreach Representative (Jan 2013). As well as participating in many of the ICG outreach events, David ...
  • ICG Led Workshop on the ‘Maths of the Universe’ is the favourite at the Royal Institution Maths Masterclass ICG outreach officer Dr. Jen Gupta, contributed a workshop on “The Mathematics of the Universe” for the Royal Institution Mathematics Masterclass for Hampshire, held at Southampton University in March. Pupil’s attending the workshop calculated the number of galaxies in the Universe based on the number observed in the Hubble Deep Field and the size of ...
  • ICG at the 2015 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. Claudia Maraston is co-Chair together with Claus Leitherer (Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore) and Stephane Charlot (Institut d’Astrophysic de Paris) of a Focus Meeting that was awarded time during the 2015 General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union that will take place in the Hawaii islands. The Focus Meeting, selected out of 43 applications is entitled ...
  • ICG leads the first publication of the SDSS-IV collaboration The very first scientific publication by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV international collaboration (http://www.sdss3.org/future/) is being led by a team from the ICG including David Wilkinson, Claudia Maraston, Daniel Thomas, and Lodovico Coccato. SDSS-IV will formally start in summer 2014, but prototype data within the survey MaNGA (Mapping Nearby Galaxies at APO) have already ...
  • Best measurement yet of Universe’s expansion A team from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) including the ICG’s Matthew Pieri have announced the best measurement yet of the Universe’s expansion by measuring the spectrum of light from distant quasars that has passed through gas clouds on its way to us. For more information on this remarkable measurement, please visit the SDSS-III website. The ...
  • NAM2014 in Portsmouth Receives Over 430 Submissions The Royal Astronomical Society National Astronomy Meeting 2014 (NAM2014) is being held in Portsmouth this year from June 23rd to 26th, and we have just finished the abstract submission process. We are delighted to receive over 430 submissions, with a final total that includes submissions to the UK Cosmology Meeting (being held as part of NAM2014) ...
  • Ripples of excitement The world of cosmology has been a-buzz this week with the first claimed detection of gravitational waves (ripples in the fabric of spacetime) imprinted in the most distant light in the universe – the cosmic microwave background. The presence of primordial gravitational waves is a distinctive prediction of cosmic inflation – the idea that our entire ...
  • Space scientists visit Gatcombe Park Primary School. The “Visit to Space”, the outreach and educational programme designed by Claudia Maraston, Daniel Thomas and Jen Gupta of the ICG, and organised by UP for It Juniors, www.upforitjuniors.co.uk, which is part of the University’s Education Liaison and Outreach Team, visited Gatcombe Park Primary School in Portsmouth on March 7. The response of pupils and ...
  • ICG Member Visits Galileo’s House Today is 450 years since the birth of Galileo Galilei, arguably one of the founders of modern cosmology, and certainly of observational astronomy and cosmology. By chance, ICG member Dr. Karen Masters had the opportunity to visit the house in which Galileo spent the last years of his life (some of it under house arrest) just ...
  • Stargazing for Schools a huge success In January primary school pupils joined cosmologists from the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation for a day of stargazing and navigation at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Organised by the ICG and the HMS Warrior 1860 Education Team, ‘Stargazing for Schools’ took place at Action Stations and on board HMS Warrior 1860 on Wednesday 22 January 2014 ...
  • ICG outreach in Mexico ICG outreach activities recently reached   Mexico City, where Gianmassimo Tasinato gave a public lecture in one of the main high schools.  A crowded auditorium of interested students listened to the lecture,  curious to see what happened during the first instants of our universe life. The students were  very surprised to know how much we can ...
  • ICG PhD researcher is FameLab UK “wildcard” ICG PhD student Claire Le Cras came second in yesterday’s South East regional final of the FameLab UK competition. FameLab contestants have just three minutes to explain a scientific concept using only the props they can carry onto the stage. Claire wowed the judges in the regional heat by using dance to explain the colours ...
  • New stringent constraints on Dark Energy With the SDSS Supernova Survey now over, Betoule et al. (2014) today provides one of the  “most stringent constraints to date on the nature of dark energy” using a combination of the SDSS and SNLS supernova surveys; only a 5.7% error on w, the equation-of-state of Dark Energy (see above or Fig 15 in paper). ...
  • First Result from Galaxy Zoo Hubble ICG PhD student Tom Melvin has led the first result from the Galaxy Zoo: Hubble project which asked members of public to classify galaxies from public Hubble Space Telescope surveys. Tom measured how the fraction of bars in visually identified spiral galaxies changed with redshift, confirming that at z=0.7 bars are much less common than ...
  • End of an era: Original SDSS is over The final data of the original Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) was published today, bring the end of an era of tremendous discovery. The original SDSS started in 2000 and performed a large-scale survey of the northern hemisphere detecting millions of galaxies and stars. In 2005, the SDSS was extended for a further three years ...
  • Portsmouth SEPnet PhD Scholarships: PhD Grand Challenges 2014 The SEPnet Universities aspire to solve some of the biggest problems in physics. These are the Grand Challenges of today. To advance towards solutions, we have established the Grand Challenge programme which may help fund your research towards a PhD. We’ve a number of challenges and SEPnet PhD Scholarships available, across all our research themes. ...
  • ICG Featured on CCi Live in the Skies The CCi Live Channel from the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth decided to do a special show on Friday entitled “CCi Live in the Skies” and featuring content from and interviews with members of the ICG. This tied into the BBC StargazingLIVE event ICG were involved in, as well as ...
  • A One-percent Measure of the Universe Researchers from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), including many members of the University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, today announced that they have measured the distances to galaxies more than six billion light-years away to an unprecedented accuracy of just one percent. Their measurements place new constraints on the properties of the ...
  • StargazingLIVE in Portsmouth Over 5,500 members of the public joined amateur astronomers, ICG members and colleagues from other local Universities and BBC presenters for the Portsmouth Stargazing Live 2014 event last night. The event, held at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard in conjunction with the BBC is one of only three nationwide events that BBC Learning are running this ...
  • Public Lectures at Winchester by ICG researcher Claudia Maraston held two public lectures on December 11 at 4.30pm and 6.30pm at the Winchester Science Center (previously Intech) in Winchester, entitled “Shining Galaxies in a Dark Universe”. Both lectures were well attended, especially the evening’s one, which featured a nearly full theatre with over 140 attendees. Many young students and teachers were present ...

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