The Astrophysics Centre for Multi-messenger Studies in Europe (ACME), funded by the European Union and coordinated by Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), is an ambitious initiative that is designed to provide seamless access to instruments, data and expertise, focussing on the new science of multi-messenger astrophysics.

Multi-messenger astrophysics is a relatively new but rapidly growing field that uses information from various cosmic signals, such as photons, gravitational waves, neutrinos, and cosmic rays, to study some of the most extreme and mysterious phenomena in the Universe like  black hole mergers, neutron star collisions, and supernova explosions. Combining data from multiple sources – or messengers – offers a more comprehensive understanding than traditional astronomy alone.

The ACME will bring together 40 leading institutions from 15 countries, including The University of Manchester’s and aims to forge a basis for strengthened long-term collaboration between these research infrastructures irrespective of location and level-up access opportunities across Europe and beyond.

The , which The University of Manchester operates on behalf of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and expertise from the will play a crucial role in facilitating these goals.

Professor Rob Beswick from The University of Manchester, who co-leads ACME’s transnational access programme, said: “ACME is an incredibly exciting opportunity. This project will bring together a wide range of world-class researchers and astronomical research infrastructure spanning astroparticle and gravitational wave facilities along the entire electromagnetic spectrum, with a common focus to advance multi-messenger astrophysics,” 

The AMCE project will be coordinated by Prof Antoine Kouchner (CNRS/Université Paris Cite) and Paolo D’Avanzo (INAF). A key element of the project is to develop six new multi-messenger Centres of Excellence across Europe, which will serve as hubs of expertise for all researchers in all aspects of direct and multi-messenger science programmes, providing support from proposals to data analysis and science interpretation.

, who leads JBCA’s involvement in these new Centres of Excellence says “The ACME project will bring many infrastructures and groups together across Europe in a unique collaboration to provide the astronomy and astroparticle communities unprecedented access to data, workflows and expertise. ACME will revolutionise how researchers in multi-messenger fields work and collaborate in the future.”

ACME officially launched in September 2024 at a kick-off meeting held in Paris.

Thirty years after the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectrum was first precisely characterised by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission, a new experiment – known as BISOU (for Balloon Interferometer for Spectral Observations of the Universe) – is expected to significantly advance these measurements, gaining a factor of ~25 in sensitivity.

If successful, the results could provide unprecedented insights into the Universe's thermal history, validate predictions of the standard Big Bang Theory and potentially reveal new physics beyond our current understanding, marking a transformational step towards an ambitious future space-based CMB spectrometer to form part of the .

The CMB is leftover radiation from the time when the Universe began. Although the CMB is everywhere in the Universe, humans can't see it with the naked eye. But, using specialist equipment, it can be made visible even through the atmosphere’s curtain, offering novel insights into the Universe’s earliest moments.  

While the CMB’s near-perfect blackbody spectrum was first accurately measured three decades ago, and space missions such as WMAP and Planck have since revolutionised our understanding of the Universe by mapping the spatial variations in CMB temperature and linear polarisation across the sky, tiny deviations in the CMB known as spectral distortions remain largely unexplored. These distortions, predicted by theory, carry vital information about various cosmic processes in regimes that have not previously been explored.

With BISOU, scientists are intensively working on a new balloon-borne differential spectrometer to measure the distortions. The Phase 0 study, which concluded earlier this year, has already demonstrated the feasibility. Now, moving into Phase A, over the next two years, the consortium of researchers from France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, the UK, the USA and Japan, will finalise the detailed concept of the BISOU stratospheric balloon project before hopefully taking it to the skies in 2028/29.

The specialist equipment – a so-called Fourier Transform Spectrometer - builds on the long heritage of the COBE/FIRAS instrument and leverages insights from earlier studies like NASA's PIXIE and the European Space Agency's FOSSIL mission proposals.

The project is coordinated by Professor Bruno Maffei and the Institute of Space Astrophysics (IAS  - Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale) Cosmology team and is funded by the French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), which recently announced the transition of BISOU to Phase A.

Neutron stars - the ultra-dense remains of a dead star - typically rotate at mind-bendingly fast speeds, taking just seconds or even a fraction of a second to fully spin on their axis.

However, the neutron star, newly discovered by an international team of astronomers, defies this rule, emitting radio signals on a comparatively leisurely interval of 54 minutes.

The team was led by Dr Manisha Caleb at the University of Sydney and Dr Emil Lenc at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and includes scientists at The University of Manchester and the University of Oxford.

The results, published today in the journal , offer new insights into the complex life cycles of stellar objects.

At the end of their life, large stars use up all their fuel and explode in a spectacular blast called a supernova. What remains is a stellar remnant called a neutron star, made up of trillions of neutrons packed into a ball so dense that its mass is 1.4 times that of the Sun is packed into a radius of just 10km.

The unexpected radio signal from the stellar object detected by the scientists travelled approximately 16,000 light years to Earth.  The nature of the radio emission and the rate at which the spin period is changing suggest it is a neutron star. However, the researchers have not ruled out the possibility of it being an isolated white dwarf with an extraordinarily strong magnetic field. Yet, the absence of other nearby highly magnetic white dwarfs makes the neutron star explanation more plausible.

Further research is required to confirm what the object is, but either scenario promises to provide valuable insights into the physics of these extreme objects. 

The findings could make scientists reconsider their decades-old understanding of neutron stars or white dwarfs; how they emit radio waves and what their populations are like in our Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery was made using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia, which can see a large part of the sky at once and means it can capture things researchers aren’t even looking for.

The research team were simultaneously monitoring a source of gamma rays and seeking a fast radio burst when they spotted the object slowly flashing in the data.

Lead author Dr Manisha Caleb from the University of Sydney Institute for Astronomy, said: “What is intriguing is how this object displays three distinct emission states, each with properties entirely dissimilar from the others. The MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa played a crucial role in distinguishing between these states. If the signals didn’t arise from the same point in the sky, we would not have believed it to be the same object producing these different signals.”

The origin of such a long period signal remains a profound mystery, with white dwarfs and neutron stars the prime suspects. But as further investigations continue, this discovery is set to deepen our understanding of the universe’s most enigmatic objects.

The telescope, launched in July 2023, is part of the Dark Energy Satellite Mission, which aims to map the dark Universe.

Led by the European Space Agency in collaboration with The Euclid Consortium - which includes astronomers at The University of Manchester in leadership positions – the mission seeks to unlock mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and reveal how and why the Universe looks as it does today.

Early observations, described in a series of published today, include five never-before-seen images of the Universe.

The papers also describe several new discoveries including, free-floating new-born planets, newly identified extragalactic star clusters, new low-mass dwarf galaxies in a nearby galaxy cluster, the distribution of dark matter and intracluster light in galaxy clusters, and very distant bright galaxies from the first billion years of the Universe.

The findings give an insight into the unprecedented power of the Euclid telescope, which is designed to provide the most precise map of our Universe over time and demonstrates Euclid’s ability to unravel the secrets of the cosmos.

Chrisopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Euclid will completely revolutionise our view of the Universe. Already these results are revealing important new findings about local galaxies, new unknown dwarf galaxies, extrasolar planets and some of the first galaxies. These results are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what will come. Soon Euclid will discover yet unknown details of the dark energy and give a full picture of how galaxy formation occurred across all cosmic time.”

Michael Brown, Professor of Astrophysics at The University of Manchester, added: “The exceptional data that Euclid is delivering over a large fraction of the sky promises to revolutionise our understanding of dark energy. It is extremely exciting to be part of the team working to extract these headline science results.”

The Early Release Observations programme was conducted during Euclid’s first months in space as a first look at the depth and diversity of science Euclid will provide. A total of 24 hours were allocated to target 17 specific astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant clusters of galaxies, producing stunning images that are invaluable for scientific research. In just a single day, Euclid produced a catalogue of more than 11 million objects in visible light and five million more in infrared light.

The images published today follow the return of produced in November 2023.

In addition to contributions to the mission’s primary objectives, scientists at The University of Manchester, in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, conducted a preliminary search of the data for distant galaxies. The red galaxies in the image show the cluster, which acts as a magnifying glass to reveal more distant sources behind. In total, 29 galaxies were discovered providing insight into the first billion years of the Universe.

Dr Rebecca Bowler, Ernest Rutherford Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: “In these spectacular images we can see galaxies that were previously invisible, because the most distant galaxies can only be discovered using the longer near-infrared wavelengths seen by Euclid. 

“This first look data has been invaluable to test our search algorithms and identifying challenges, such as confusion of distant galaxies with brown dwarfs in our own Milky Way, before we start working on the main data later this year.   

“What is amazing is that these images cover an area of less than 1% of the full deep observations, showing that we expect to detect thousands of early galaxies in the next few years with Euclid, which will be revolutionary in understanding how and when galaxies formed after the Big Bang.”

The images obtained by Euclid are at least four times sharper than those that can be taken from ground-based telescopes. They cover large patches of sky at unrivalled depth, looking far into the distant Universe using both visible and infrared light.

The next data release from the Euclid Consortium will focus on Euclid’s primary science objectives. A first worldwide quick release is currently planned for March 2025, while a wider data release is scheduled for June 2026. At least three other quick releases and two other data releases are expected before 2031, which corresponds to a few months after the end of Euclid’s initial survey.

The Euclid Consortium comprises more than 2600 members, including over 1000 researchers from more than 300 laboratories in 15 European countries, plus Canada, Japan and United States, covering various fields in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, and particle physics.

Josef Aschbacher, ESA Director General, said: “Euclid demonstrates European excellence in frontier science and state-of-the-art technology, and showcases the importance of international collaboration.

“The mission is the result of many years of hard work from scientists, engineers and industry throughout Europe and from members of the Euclid scientific consortium around the world, all brought together by ESA. They can be proud of this achievement – the results are no small feat for such an ambitious mission and such complex fundamental science. Euclid is at the very beginning of its exciting journey to map the structure of the Universe.”

, Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in recognition of his “invaluable contributions to science”.

Professor Garrett is one of more than 90 exceptional researchers across the world to be selected by the Royal Society - the UK’s national academy of sciences.

Michael is the inaugural Sir Bernard Lovell chair of Astrophysics at The University of Manchester and has broad scientific interest, including the study of the distant universe via high resolution radio observations. He is also active in the and is currently chair of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Permanent Committee.

Prof Garret is a leader in the field of astrophysics and was responsible for the final design, construction, and operational phases of the International , and while Director of the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (2003-2007), he developed the technique of wide-field and spearheaded the roll-out of real-time VLBI (e-VLBI) across the European VLBI Network and beyond.

Garrett was also instrumental in finalising the original design concept for the .

Drawn from across academia, industry and wider society, the new intake spans disciplines as varied as studying the origins and evolution of our universe, pioneering treatments for Huntington’s Disease, developing the first algorithm for video streaming and generating new insights into memory formation.

Prof Garrett joins other leaders in their fields, including the Nobel laureate, Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier; an Emmy winner, Dr Andrew Fitzgibbons (for his contributions to the 3D camera tracker software “boujou”); and the former Chief Scientific Advisor to the US President, Professor Anthony Fauci.

Sir Adrian Smith, President of the Royal Society, said: “I am pleased to welcome such an outstanding group into the Fellowship of the Royal Society.

“This new cohort have already made significant contributions to our understanding of the world around us and continue to push the boundaries of possibility in academic research and industry.

“From visualising the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution to leading the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, their diverse range of expertise is furthering human understanding and helping to address some of our greatest challenges.

“It is an honour to have them join the Fellowship.”

Statistics about this year’s intake of Fellows:

• 30% of this year’s intake of Fellows, Foreign Members and Honorary Fellows are women.
• New Fellows have been elected from 23 UK institutions, including The University of Nottingham, British Antarctic Survey, University of Strathclyde and the Natural History Museum
• They have been elected from countries including Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico and Singapore

The full list of the newly elected Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society can be found here:

Described by the ERC as among the EU’s most prestigious and competitive grants, today’s funding has been awarded to:

• ,  Director of the Photon Science Institute, to develop a table-top nuclear facility to produce cold actinide molecules that will enable novel searches for new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics.
• Sir Professor Andre Geim, who isolated graphene in 2004 with Sir Professor Konstantin Novoselov, to explore 2D materials and their van der Waals assemblies.
•  , to explore Top and Higgs Couplings and extended Higgs Sectors with rare multi-Top multi-Higgs Events with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This project aims at deeper insight into the most fundamental properties of nature beyond our current understanding.

The University of Manchester received seven of the 42 grants awarded to UK institutions. The other 91ֱ�� recipients are:

 Thomas Anthopoulos, Professor of Emerging Optoelectronics, based in the and , to investigate scalable nanomanufacturing paradigms for emerging electronics (SNAP). The program aims to develop sustainable large-area electronics, a potential game-changer in emerging semiconductor markets, that will help reduce society's reliance on current polluting technologies while enabling radically new applications.

•  , to lead work into chemically fuelled molecular ratchets. Ratcheting underpins the mechanisms of molecular machinery, gives chemical processes direction, and helps explain how chemistry becomes biology.
• , in the Department of Chemistry and  91ֱ�� Institute of Biotechnology, to develop enzymatic methods for peptide synthesis (EZYPEP). Peptides are fundamental in life and are widely used as therapeutic agents, vaccines, biomaterials and in many other applications. Currently peptides are produced by chemical synthesis, which is inefficient, expensive, difficult to scale-up and creates a huge amount of harmful waste that is damaging to the environment. EZYPEP will address this problem by developing enzymatic methods for the more sustainable, cleaner and scalable synthesis of peptides, including essential medicines to combat infectious diseases, cancer and diabetes.
• advanced gran,  to investigate how genomic complexity shapes long-term bacterial evolution and adaptation.

The grant recipients will join a community of just 255 awarded ERC advanced grants, from a total of 1,829 submissions. The community also includes:

As a result of today’s announcement, the ERC will be investing nearly €652 million across the 255 projects.

Professor Chris Parkes, Head of Department for Physics and Astronomy, which received three of the seven grants, said: “Today’s triple award reflects our department’s continued leadership in pioneering research. We’re home to Jodrell Bank, host of the Square Kilometre Array Observatory – set to be the largest radio telescope in the world; the National Graphene Institute – a world-leading centre for 2D material research with the largest clean rooms in European academia; we lead experiments at CERN and Fermilab; and – crucially – we host a world-leading community of vibrant and collaborative researchers like Professors Flanagan, Geim and Peters who lead the way. Today’s announcement recognises their role as outstanding research leaders who will drive the next generation to deliver transformative breakthroughs.”

Professor Richard Curry, Vice-Dean for Research and Innovation in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester, added: “Our University’s history of scientific and engineering research is internationally recognised but it does not constrain us. Instead, it’s the work of our researchers – like the seven leaders celebrated today – and what they decide to do next, that will define us.  We are proud to have a culture where responsible risk-taking is nurtured and transformative outcomes delivered, and we look forward to these colleagues using this environment to deliver world-leading and world-changing research.”

Iliana Ivanova, Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth at the ERC, said: “This investment nurtures the next generation of brilliant minds. I look forward to seeing the resulting breakthroughs and fresh advancements in the years ahead.”

The ERC grants are part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

Using the Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank the researchers from the UK, Germany and Australia have shed new light on radio emission coming from a magnetar, known as XTE J1810-197.

Magnetars are a type of neutron star and the strongest magnets in the Universe. At roughly 8,000 light years away, this magnetar is also the closest known to Earth.

The magnetar is emitting light which is strongly polarised and rapidly changing. The scientists say this implies that interactions at the surface of the star are more complex than previous theoretical explanations suggest.

The results are published in two papers in the journal Nature Astronomy today.

Detecting radio pulses from magnetars is already extremely rare; XTE J1810-197 is one of only a handful known to produce them.

XTE J1810-197 was first observed to emit radio signals in 2003 before going silent for well over a decade. The signals were again detected by The University of Manchester's 76-m Lovell telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in 2018.

Since then, researchers at the University, in collaboration with institutes including the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and the University of Southampton have been closely observing the magnetar.

Using the Lovell, Effelsberg and Murriyang telescopes, researchers have since noticed significant changes in the radio signals coming from the magnetar, particularly in the way the light was polarised, indicating that the magnetar's radio beam was shifting its direction in relation to Earth.

The researchers believed this was caused by an effect called free precession where the magnetar wobbles slightly due to slight asymmetries in its structure, similar to a spinning top.

Unexpectedly, this wobbling motion decreased rapidly over a few months and until it eventually stopped altogether. This contradicts the idea proposed by many astronomers that repeating fast radio bursts could be caused by magnetars undergoing precession.

Gregory Desvignes from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, and lead author of one of the two papers, said: “We expected to see some variations in the polarisation of this magnetar’s emission, as we knew this from other magnetars but we did not expect that these variations are so systematic, following exactly the behaviour that would be caused by the wobbling of the star.”

But the reason as to why the circular polarisation changes, where the light appears to spiral as it moves through space, remain uncertain.

Dr Marcus Lower, a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO, who led the Australian research using Murriyang, CSIRO’s Parkes radio telescope, said: “Our results suggest there is a superheated plasma above the magnetar's magnetic pole, which is acting like a polarising filter. How exactly the plasma is doing this is still to be determined.”

Papers
Desvignes, G., Weltevrede, P., Gao, Y. et al. . Nat Astron (2024).
Lower, M.E., Johnston, S., Lyutikov, M. et al. Linear to circular conversion in the polarized radio emission of a magnetar. Nat Astron (2024).

Water is a key ingredient for life on Earth and is also thought to play a significant role in planet formation, yet, until now, astronomers have never been able to map how water is distributed in a stable, cool disc — the type of disc that offers the most favourable conditions for planets to form around stars.

For the first time, astronomers have weighed the amount of water vapour around a typical planet-forming star.  

The new findings were made possible thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array - a collection of telescopes in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The University of Manchester’s hosts the UK ALMA Regional Centre Node (UK ARC) which supports UK astronomers using ALMA.

Dr Anita Richards, Senior Visiting Fellow at The University of Manchester and previously a member of the UK ARC, played a key role in the group verifying the operation of the 'Band 5' receiver system, which was essential for ALMA to produce the detailed image of the water.

The observations, published today in the journal, reveal at least three times as much water as in all of Earth’s oceans in the inner disc of the young Sun-like star HL Tauri, located 450 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

Stefano Facchini, an astronomer at the University of Milan, Italy, who led the study, said: “I had never imagined that we could capture an image of oceans of water vapour in the same region where a planet is likely forming.”

Co-author Leonardo Testi, an astronomer at the University of Bologna, Italy, added: “It is truly remarkable that we can not only detect but also capture detailed images and spatially resolve water vapour at a distance of 450 light-years from us.”

These observations with ALMA, which show details as small as a human hair at a kilometre distance, allow astronomers to determine the distribution of water in different regions of the disc.

A significant amount of water was found in the region where a known gap in the HL Tauri disc exists – a place where a planet could potentially be forming. Radial gaps are carved out in gas- and dust-rich discs by orbiting young planet-like bodies as they gather up material and grow. This suggests that this water vapour could affect the chemical composition of planets forming in those regions.

But, observing water with a ground-based telescope is no mean feat as the abundant water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere degrades the astronomical signals.

, operated by European Southern Observatory (ESO), together with its international partners, sits at about 5000 metres elevation and is built in a high and dry environment specifically to minimise this degradation, providing exceptional observing conditions. To date, ALMA is the only facility able to map the distribution of water in a cool planet-forming disc.

The dust grains that make up a disc are the seeds of, colliding and clumping into ever larger bodies orbiting the star. Astronomers believe that where it is cold enough for water to freeze onto dust particles, things stick together more efficiently — an ideal spot for planet formation.

Members of the UK ARC are contributing to a major upgrade of ALMA, which with ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope () also coming online within the decade, will provide even clearer views of planet formation and the role water plays in it.  In particular , the Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph, will give astronomers unrivalled views of the inner regions of planet-forming discs, where planets like Earth form.

Using the , astronomers from a number of institutions including The University of Manchester and the in Germany found an object in orbit around a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar located around 40,000 light years away in a dense group of stars known as a globular cluster.

Using the clock-like ticks from the millisecond pulsar they showed that the massive object lies in the so-called black hole mass gap.

It could be the first discovery of the much-coveted radio pulsar – black hole binary; a stellar pairing that could allow new tests of Einstein’s general relativity and open doors to the study of black holes.

The results are in the journal Science.

When neutron stars - the ultra-dense remains of dead star – acquire too much mass, usually by consuming or colliding with another star, they will collapse. What they become after they collapse is the cause of much speculation, but it is believed that they could become black holes – objects so gravitationally attractive that even light cannot escape them.

Astronomers believe that the total mass required for a neutron star to collapse is 2.2 times the mass of the sun. Theory, backed by observation, tells us that the lightest black holes created by these stars are much larger, at about five times more massive than the Sun, giving rise to what is known as the ‘black hole mass gap’.

The nature of compact objects in this mass gap is unknown and detailed study has so far proved challenging. The discovery of the object may help finally understand these objects. 

, added: “The ability of the extremely sensitive MeerKAT telescope to reveal and study these objects is a enabling a great step forward and provides us with a glimpse of what will be possible with the Square Kilometre Array.”

The discovery of the object was made while observing a large cluster of stars known as NGC 1851 located in the southern constellation of Columba, using the MeerKAT telescope.

The globular cluster NGC 1851 is a dense collection of old stars that are much more tightly packed than the stars in the rest of the Galaxy. Here, it is so crowded that the stars can interact with each other, disrupting orbits and in the most extreme cases colliding.

The astronomers, part of the international Transients and Pulsars with MeerKAT (TRAPUM) collaboration, believe that it is one such collision between two neutron stars that is proposed to have created the massive object that now orbits the radio pulsar.

The team were able to detect faint pulses from one of the stars, identifying it as a radio pulsar - a type of neutron star that spins rapidly and shines beams of radio light into the Universe like a cosmic lighthouse.

The pulsar spins more than 170 times a second, with every rotation producing a rhythmic pulse, like the ticking of a clock. The ticking of these pulses is incredibly regular and by observing how the times of the ticks change, using a technique called pulsar timing, they were able to make extremely precise measurements of its orbital motion.

The regular timing also allowed a very precise measurement of the system’s location, showing that the object in orbit with the pulsar was no regular star but an extremely dense remnant of a collapsed star. Observations also showed that the companion has a mass that was simultaneously bigger than that of any known neutron star and yet smaller than that of any known black hole, placing it squarely in the black-hole mass gap.

While the team cannot conclusively say whether they have discovered the most massive neutron star known, the lightest black hole known or even some new exotic star variant, what is certain is that they have uncovered a unique laboratory for probing the properties of matter under the most extreme conditions in the Universe. 

Arunima Dutta concludes: "We're not done with this system yet.

“Uncovering the true nature of the companion will a turning point in our understanding of neutron stars, black holes, and whatever else might be lurking in the black hole mass gap.”

The centre, led Dr Mauricio A Álvarez, will train the next generation of AI researchers to develop AI methods designed to accelerate new scientific discoveries – specifically in the fields of astronomy, engineering biology and material science.

The University will be working in partnership with The University of Cambridge, and is one of 12 Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) in Artificial Intelligence (AI) based at 16 universities, announced by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) today (31 October).

The investment by UKRI aims to ensure that the UK continues to have the skills needed to seize the potential of the AI era, and to nurture the British tech talent that will push the AI revolution forwards. 

£117 million in total has been awarded to the 12 CDTs and builds on the previous UKRI investment of £100 million in 2018.

Doctoral students at The University of Manchester will be provided with a foundation in Machine Learning and AI and an in-depth understanding of the implications of its application to solve real-world problems.

The programme will also cover the areas of responsible AI and equality, diversity and inclusion.

Dr Mauricio A Álvarez, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning at The University of Manchester, said: "We are delighted to be awarded funding for this new AI CDT. 91ֱ�� is investing heavily in AI research and translation, and the CDT will complement other significant efforts in research through our AI Fundamentals Centre at the University and innovation via the Turing Innovation Catalyst. Our partnership with Cambridge will also enable us to educate experts capable of generalising and translating nationally to stimulate the development and adoption of AI technology in high-potential, lower AI-maturity sectors.

“Modern science depends on a variety of complex systems, both in terms of the facilities that we use and the processes that we model. AI has the potential to help us understand these systems better, as well as to make them more efficient.

“The AI methods we will develop will apply to a wide range of challenges in complex systems, from transport systems to sports teams. We are partnering with a diverse pool of industry collaborators to address these challenges jointly."

Dr Julia Handl, Professor in Decision Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “This CDT is a fantastic opportunity to bring together researchers from a wide spectrum of disciplines, from across all three of Manchester’s Faculties, to ensure we can develop innovative solutions that are appropriate to the complexity and uncertainty of real-world systems. The involvement of the Faculty of Humanities is crucial in ensuring such systems are effective and inclusive in supporting human decision makers, and in delivering the centre’s cross-cutting theme of increasing business productivity, supported by collaboration with the Productivity Institute, the Masood Enterprise Centre and a range of industry partners.”

UKRI Chief Executive, Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser, said: “The UK is in a strong position to harness the power of AI to transform many aspects of our lives for the better. Crucial to this endeavour is nurturing the talented people and teams we need to apply AI to a broad spectrum of challenges, from healthy aging to sustainable agriculture, ensuring its responsible and trustworthy adoption. UKRI is investing £117 million in Centres for Doctoral Training to develop the talented researchers and innovators we need for success.”

Dr Kedar Pandya, Executive Director, Cross-Council Programmes at UKRI, said: “This £117 million investment, will involve multiple business and institutional partners for the Centres of Doctoral Training. These include well-known brands such as IBM, Astra Zeneca, and Google, as well as small to medium sized enterprises that are innovating in the AI field. A further £110 million has been leveraged from all partners in the form of cash or in-kind contributions such as use of facilities, resources or expertise.”

The first cohort of UKRI AI CDT students will start in the 2024/2025 academic year, recruitment for which will begin shortly.

The Japanese-led LiteBIRD mission (‘Light satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection’) will analyse variations in light left over from the Big Bang, to test whether the current theory of how our Universe expanded immediately after it was formed (cosmological inflation theory) is correct.

The UK Space Agency has committed an initial £2.7 million to the mission, which will fund a group of UK scientists, including from The University of Manchester, to design elements of LiteBIRD’s highly specialised science instruments and analyse their findings.

The cash will also cover production of the telescopes’ lenses and filters by Cardiff University, which is the only institution in the world with the expertise needed to make them.

The UK intends to invest a total throughout the life of the mission, slated for launch before 2030.

Prof Michael Brown, Co-Principal Investigator, and Head of Cosmology at The University of Manchester, said: “This is fantastic news for the UK. Now that we have major roles in two leading cosmology experiments, LiteBIRD and Simons Observatory, we can build on the already strong teams that exist in the UK and make major contributions to one of the most important and interesting fields of astrophysics.”

The theory of cosmological inflation predicts that “primordial gravitational waves” will be observable in the light left over from the very beginning of our Universe - the ‘cosmic microwave background’ (CMB). LiteBIRD plans to examine the pattern of B-mode polarisation in the CMB, to test this theory.

Astronomers at the University of Manchester will work on the data analysis team to separate the CMB radiation from all the other forms of radiation from our Galaxy and all other galaxies in the Universe, while mitigating instrumental effects in the data.

Prof Clive Dickinson, 91ֱ�� Principal Investigator for LiteBIRD UK, and Professor of Astrophysics at The University of Manchester, said: “I am delighted that the UK is formerly joining LiteBIRD, which puts us in the front seat for cosmological research on the international stage.

“The previous CMB space mission, ESA’s Planck satellite, for which The University of Manchester had played a major role, has become the gold standard in cosmology and I expect LiteBIRD to be the same in the 2030s.

“Furthermore, the huge amount of additional science that can be done with the superior space data cannot be overstated – we will be analysing the data for many years and we can only imagine what the new data may reveal.”

Coordinated by the will launch with a combination of high, mid, and low frequency telescopes to detect B-mode signals in CMB with unprecedented sensitivity, potentially proving or disproving cosmological inflation.

The UK is part of a led by the French space agency CNES, who will deliver the high and mid frequency telescopes. Much of the optical design and component development will be led by Cardiff University with support from other UK universities including Cambridge, MSSL, UCL, Oxford and Sussex.

The University of Manchester has a strong history of CMB research going back to the late 1970s. Since then, 91ֱ�� has been involved in several world-leading experiments, leading up to immensely successful ESA Planck mission, that has revolutionised our view of the Universe.

LiteBIRD is the successor to Planck and the expertise learnt from previous missions will be invaluable.

Dr Stuart Harper, Post-Doctoral Researcher at The University of Manchester, said: “I’m excited to work on LiteBIRD. Much of my PhD and postdoctoral work has been focussed on understanding contaminating “foreground” emission for CMB data and also dealing with complicated instrumental errors in radio data. Both these things will be critical for the analysis of LiteBIRD data and therefore I look forward to using my skills within the international collaboration. It also gives me a real focus and long-term goals for my career.”

The University of Manchester is also leading the UK contribution to Simons Observatory: a ground-based experiment that will measure CMB polarization from the ground. These two world-leading experiments puts 91ֱ�� and the UK in a strong position for cosmological research over the next decade.

The sample was collected as part of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, which returned to earth today, Sunday, 24 September.

It is NASA’s first mission to collect a sample from an asteroid sample and is the largest asteroid sample ever returned to Earth, estimated to hold around 250g of Bennu's material - rocks and dust collected from the asteroid’s surface.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center will release 25% of the sample to a cohort of more than 200 members from more than 35 globally distributed institutions, including a team of scientists from The University of Manchester’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, to analyse the sample.

Over two years, the team will work to understand the history of the asteroid, its components and its precursors.

The findings will ultimately help scientists to understand more about the origin of the Solar System and of organics and water that could have led to life on Earth. The data collected also aids our understanding of asteroid impacts on Earth.

Dr Sarah Crowther, Research Fellow in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The University of Manchester, said: “It is a real honour to be selected to be part of the OSIRIS-REx Sample Analysis Team, working with some of the best scientists around the world. We’re excited to receive samples in the coming weeks and months, and to begin analysing them and see what secrets asteroid Bennu holds.

“A lot of our research focuses on meteorites, and we can learn a lot about the history of the Solar System from them. But meteorites get hot coming through Earth’s atmosphere and can sit on Earth for many years before they are found, so the local environment and weather can alter or even erase important information about their composition and history.

“Sample return missions like OSIRIS-REx are vitally important because the returned samples are pristine, we know exactly which asteroid they come from and can be certain that they are never exposed to the atmosphere so that important information is retained.”

Asteroid Bennu is rich in carbon, meaning it could contain the chemical building blocks of life. Every few years, it flies close to Earth, crossing Earth’s orbital path, making it accessible to a mission like OSIRIS-REx. Bennu also has a (very small) chance of hitting Earth next century, meaning studying Bennu can help us learn how to be prepared to defend against an impact.

The spacecraft launched on 8 September 2016 and arrived at Bennu in December 2018, and, after mapping the asteroid for almost two years, collected a sample from the surface on 20 October 2020 before landing today, 24 September.

OSIRIS-REx released its sample return capsule into the atmosphere as it flew by Earth. The capsule descended by parachute, landing in the Utah western desert before being transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center, from where it will now be dispatched to scientists around the world.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will  to explore asteroid Apophis, which it will take six years to reach, while the sample from Bennu will continue to offer generations of scientists a window into the time when the Sun and planets were forming about 4.5 billion years ago.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers including those at The University of Manchester and University of Victoria in Canada discovered that galaxies like our own Milky Way dominate throughout the universe and are surprisingly common.

These galaxies go far back in the Universe’s history with many of these galaxies forming 10 billion years ago or longer.

The Milky Way is a typical ‘disk’ galaxy, which a shape similar to a pancake or compact disk, rotating about its centre and often containing spiral arms.  These galaxies are thought to be the most common in the nearby Universe and might be the types of galaxies where life can develop given the nature of their formation history. 

However, astronomers previously considered that these types of galaxies were too fragile to exist in the early Universe when galaxy mergers were more common, destroying what we thought was their delicate shapes.

The new discovery, published today in the , finds that these ‘disk’ galaxies are ten times more common than what astronomers believed based on previous observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disk galaxies were almost non-existent until the Universe was about six billion years old, these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the Universe.”

The research completely overturns the existing understanding of how scientists think our Universe evolves, and the scientists say new ideas need to be considered.

Lead author, Leonardo Ferreira from the University of Victoria, said: “For over 30 years it was thought that these disk galaxies were rare in the early Universe due to the common violent encounters that galaxies undergo. The fact that JWST finds so many is another sign of the power of this instrument and that the structures of galaxies form earlier in the Universe, much earlier in fact, than anyone had anticipated. 

It was once thought that disk galaxies such as the Milky Way were relatively rare through cosmic history, and that they only formed after the Universe was already middle aged. 

Previously, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope believed that galaxies had mostly irregular and peculiar structures that resemble mergers.  However, the superior abilities of JWST now allows us to see the true structure of these galaxies for the first time. 

The researchers say that this is yet another sign that ‘structure’ in the Universe forms much quicker than anyone had anticipated.

Professor Conselice continues: “These JWST results show that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way, are the most common type of galaxy in the Universe. This implies that most stars exist and form within these galaxies which is changing our complete understanding of how galaxy formation occurs. These results also suggest important questions about dark matter in the early Universe which we know very little about.”

“Based on our results astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred over the past 10 billion years.”

The images, released today by an international team of astronomers led by Professor Mike Barlow (UCL, UK) and Dr Nick Cox (ACRI-ST, France), with Professor Albert Zijlstra of The University of Manchester, showcase the nebula's intricate and ethereal beauty in unprecedented detail, providing scientists and the public with a mesmerizing view of this celestial wonder. 

For many sky enthusiasts, the Ring Nebula is a well-known object that is visible all summer long and is located in the constellation Lyra.  

A small telescope will already reveal the characteristic donut-like structure of glowing gas that gave the Ring Nebula its name.  

The Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula - objects that are the colourful remnants of dying stars that have thrown out much of their mass at the end of their lives.  

Its distinct structure and its vibrant colours have long captivated the human imagination and the stunning new images captured by the JWST offer an unparalleled opportunity to study and understand the complex processes that shaped this cosmic masterpiece.  

Albert Zijlstra, Professor in Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, said: “We are amazed by the details in the images, better than we have ever seen before. We always knew planetary nebulae were pretty. What we see now is spectacular.” 

Dr Mike Barlow, the lead scientist of the JWST Ring Nebula Project, added: "The James Webb Space Telescope has provided us with an extraordinary view of the Ring Nebula that we've never seen before. The high-resolution images not only showcase the intricate details of the nebula's expanding shell but also reveal the inner region around the central white dwarf in exquisite clarity. We are witnessing the final chapters of a star's life, a preview of the Sun’s distant future so to speak, and JWST's observations have opened a new window into understanding these awe-inspiring cosmic events. We can use the Ring Nebula as our laboratory to study how planetary nebulae form and evolve." The Ring Nebula's mesmerizing features are a testament to the stellar life cycle. 

Approximately 2,600 lightyears away from Earth, the nebula was born from a dying star that expelled its outer layers into space. What makes these nebulae truly breath-taking is their variety of shapes and patterns, that often include delicate, glowing rings, expanding bubbles or intricate, wispy clouds.  

These patterns are the consequence of the complex interplay of different physical processes that are not well understood yet. Light from the hot central star now illuminates these layers. 

Just like fireworks, different chemical elements in the nebula emit light of specific colours. This then results in exquisite and colourful objects, and furthermore allows astronomers to study the chemical evolution of these objects in detail.  

Dr Cox, the co-lead scientist, said: "These images hold more than just aesthetic appeal; they provide a wealth of scientific insights into the processes of stellar evolution. By studying the Ring Nebula with JWST, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of the life cycles of stars and the elements they release into the cosmos.” 

The international research team analysing these images is composed of researchers from the UK, France, Canada, USA, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Ireland and Belgium. 

They say that JWST/MIRI images of the Ring Nebula are coming soon. 

The alignment of planetary nebulae was discovered ten years ago by a 91ֱ�� PhD student, Bryan Rees, but has remained unexplained.

New data obtained with the in Chile and the published in , has confirmed the alignment but also found a particular group of stars that is responsible, namely close binary stars.

Planetary nebulae are clouds of gas that are expelled by stars at the end of their lives - the Sun will also form one about five billion years from now. The ejected clouds are ‘ghosts’ of their dying stars and they form beautiful structures such as an hourglass or butterfly shape.

The team studied a group of so-called planetary nebulae found in the Galactic Bulge near the centre of our Milky Way. Each of these nebulae are unrelated and come from different stars, which were born at different times, and spend their lives in completely different places. However, the study found that many of their shapes line up in the sky in the same way and are aligned almost parallel to the Galactic plane (our Milky Way).

This is in the same direction as found by Bryan Rees a decade ago.

The new research, led by Shuyu Tan, a student at the University of Hong Kong, found that the alignment is present only in planetary nebulae which have a close stellar companion. The companion star orbits the main star at the centre of the planetary nebulae in an orbit closer than Mercury is to our own Sun.

The planetary nebulae that do not show close companions do not show the alignment, which suggests that the alignment is potentially linked to the initial separation of the binary components at the time of the star’s birth.

Albert Zijlstra, co-author and Professor in Astrophysics at The University of Manchester, said: “This finding pushes us closer to understanding the cause for this mysterious alignment.

“Planetary nebulae offer us a window into the heart of our galaxy and this insight deepens our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of the Milky Way’s bulge region.

“The formation of stars in the bulge of our galaxy is a complex process that involves various factors such as gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields. Until now, we have had a lack of evidence for which of these mechanisms could be causing this process to happen and generating this alignment.

“The significance in this research lies in the fact that we now know that the alignment is observed in this very specific subset of planetary nebulae.”

The researchers investigated 136 confirmed planetary nebulae in the galaxy bulge – the thickest section of our Milky Way composed of stars, gas and dust - using the European Southern Observatory Very Large Telescope, which has a main mirror diameter of  eight metres.

They also re-examined and re-measured 40 of these from the original study using images from the high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope.

Prof Quentin Parker, the corresponding author from the University of Hong Kong, suggests the nebulae may be shaped by the rapid orbital motion of the companion star, which may even end up orbiting inside the main star.

The alignment of the nebulae may mean that the close binary system preferentially forms with their orbits in the same plane.

Although further studies are needed to fully understand the mechanisms behind the alignment, the findings provide important evidence for the presence of a constant and controlled process that has influenced star formation over billions of years and vast distances.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid flagship Dark Energy Satellite Mission is due to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday, 1 July 2023. 

Euclid’s six-year mission is to map the dark Universe, using the positions of galaxies and images of dark matter produced from the gravitational lensing distortions of distant galaxies.

The maps contain information about the expansion history of the Universe and the evolution of the structure within it and by analysing these maps, astronomers will be able to determine the nature of both dark matter and dark energy.

Dark matter - which unlike normal matter does not reflect or emit light - binds together galaxies creating the environment for stars, planets and life, while dark energy is a mysterious new phenomenon which is pushing galaxies away from each other and causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate.

The Euclid Consortium team, which includes scientists from The University of Manchester, will carry out a very precise and accurate analysis of the images and distances of 1.5 billion galaxies over one-third of the sky.

Euclid will also measure the spectrum of light from over 35 million galaxies to accurately measure their distance from Earth.

The University of Manchester will lead the work to understand the properties of galaxies that Euclid will study, including an investigation into how the first galaxies formed and developing and testing new methods for understanding the galaxy data when it arrives. 

Professor Christopher Conselice of the University of Manchester, who leads the Legacy Science analysis for Euclid, said: “Euclid will change our entire view of the Universe. It will reveal the origin of the still mysterious dark energy, as well as provide us with data that will help explain the origin of stars, galaxies and planets. The importance of this mission cannot be overstated.”

Rebecca Bowler, a Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, who is leading the efforts to find the most distant galaxies with Euclid, added: "Euclid will revolutionise our understanding of how the very first galaxies and super-massive black holes are formed.”

The Euclid satellite hosts two state-of-the-art instruments, an optical camera (VIS) built in the UK, and a Near-Infrared (NISP) camera led by France. The VIS Instrument will take images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the gravitational lensing distortions.

The NISP Instrument will take multicolour images and the spectrum of light of galaxies from which their distance can be measured.

Euclid’s wide field of view and large instruments will allow it to image more area of sky in one day than the Hubble Space Telescope in its first 25 years.

After Launch, Euclid will travel over one million miles into space away from the Sun, where the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will cause it to orbit the Sun once a year, in step with the Earth.

It will scan the sky and send many petabytes of data back to ESA’s ground stations where the data is distributed across nine Euclid Science Data Centres located in Europe, and one in North America.

The UK’s Science Data Centre is hosted in Edinburgh.

The Data Centres will process the Euclid data, along with data from complementary ground-based astronomical surveys, day and night, ready for teams of scientists to work on, with the results released to the public.

The mission, including the design, construction and analysis, involves more than 2000 scientists from Europe, including many from the UK, along with the European Space Agency and industrial teams.

The UK has been involved in the design and building of Euclid from its earliest days, co-leading the teams defining the science programme and observational strategy, leading the construction of the VIS Instrument, leading the gravitational lensing data analysis and production of its high-level data products, and coordinating the science analysis for Euclid, along with many other roles.

As well as aiming to answer some of science's most fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe, Euclid is set to revolutionise studies across all of astronomy, providing a lasting legacy database for professional astronomers and the public to explore.

For more information about the Euclid mission in the UK visit: 

The waves are expected to come from pairs of supermassive black holes found in the centres of merging galaxies and the discovery could hold answers about the formation and evolution of the Universe and the galaxies that populate it, including our own Milky Way.

The finding stems from observations made over the last 25 years using six of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes, including the Lovell Telescope at The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, and is presented by a team of researchers from the European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA), in collaboration with Indian and Japanese colleagues of the Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA).

The results are published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Dr Michael Keith, Lecturer at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester, said: “The results presented today mark the beginning of a new journey into the Universe to unveil some of its unsolved mysteries.

"We are incredibly excited that after decades of work by hundreds of astronomers and physicists around the world, we are finally seeing the signature of gravitational waves from the distant Universe.”

Gravitational waves are ripples in space that can be produced by two objects orbiting each other. But they are extremely weak and hard to detect.

The observation of gravitational waves produced by orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes, which are hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun, will allow us to learn about the evolution of galaxies and the origin of the enigmatic black holes located in their centres.

The EPTA is a collaboration of scientists from more than ten institutions across Europe and brings together astronomers and theoretical physicists to observe an array of pulsars – neutron stars in space that emit radio waves – with the specific goal of detecting gravitational waves.

The telescopes include, the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany, the Lovell Telescope of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in the United Kingdom, the Nançay Radio Telescope in France, the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy and the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope in the Netherlands.

Combined, the pulsar observations construct a Galaxy-sized gravitational wave detector – spanning from the Earth to 25 carefully chosen pulsars across the Galaxy. This makes it possible to study gravitational waves with wavelengths much longer than those seen by other experiments.

Since the wavelengths are very long, the frequencies are very low, this is why it has taken many years to collect enough data for this new signal to become apparent.

The observations have been complemented by data from the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India and provided by InPTA, leading to the development of a uniquely sensitive dataset. This announcement has also been coordinated with similar publications by other pulsar timing arrays across the world.

Although the analysis of the EPTA data presented today is in line with what astrophysicists expect, Prof Alberto Vecchio from the University of Birmingham, UK, nevertheless points out that “the gold-standard in physics to claim the detection of a new phenomenon is that the result of the experiment has a probability of occurring by chance less than one time in a million.” 

The result reported by EPTA - as well as by the other international collaborations - does not yet meet this criterion. To do so, the researchers aim to expand the current datasets in an International Pulsar Timing Array. This will exploit an array consisting of over 100 pulsars, observed with thirteen radio telescopes across the world, and agglomerating more than 10,000 observations for each pulsar, which should allow the astronomers to obtain irreproachable proof of having expanded the gravitational wave window on the Universe. 

A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion and is the end of a star’s life. In the case of Type 1a supernovae, they can be used to measure distances in the Universe or for the study of dark energy.

Usually, Type Ia supernova occur when a white dwarf star collects material from another star within its orbit. Once the white dwarf eventually reaches its critical mass, it triggers a supernova explosion.

SN 2020eyj – a unique Type Ia supernova - was first detected on 7 March 2020, but the origin and nature of the progenitor system were unknown.

The unusual nature of the supernova was revealed by its abnormal light curve and infrared emission, narrow helium emission lines and, for the first time ever in a Type Ia supernova, also a radio counterpart.

Now, using the e-MERLIN telescope network, the first radio detection of a Type Ia supernova, confirms that the SN 2020eyj came from a binary star system composed of a white dwarf and a solar-type star.

The results were published in the journal

Dr David Williams, e-MERLIN Operations Support Scientist at The University of Manchester, said: “Astronomers have been trying to detect radio emission from a Type Ia supernova for a few decades. Using e-MERLIN, the observatory staff were able to react quickly when we first heard of the potential interesting nature of this source from the authors of this study.

“The exquisite angular resolution of e-MERLIN combined with its high sensitivity enabled the radio emission to be pinpointed to the supernova, which is critical for establishing that the multi-wavelength emission was linked and attributed to the same source.”

Radio telescopes detect and amplify radio waves from space, turning them into signals that astronomers use to enhance understanding of the Universe.

e-MERLIN is one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes, created by linking seven individual large dishes across the UK (including the iconic Lovell Telescope) via a dedicated optical fibre network to a powerful correlator at . It is operated by the University of Manchester J.

Supernova 2020eyj was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility camera on Palomar mountain in California, USA. The research was led by Erik Kool, researcher at the University of Stockholm, in collaboration with research institutes across the world.

Javier Moldón, a former e-MERLIN support scientist and researcher at the IAA-CSIC in Spain, who participated in the discovery, said: "This first radio detection of a Type Ia supernova is a milestone that has allowed us to demonstrate that the exploded white dwarf was accompanied by a normal, non-degenerate star before the explosion.

"In addition, with these observations, we can estimate the mass and geometry of the material surrounding the supernova, which allows us to better understand what the system was like before the explosion.

"Now that we have demonstrated that radio observations can provide direct and unique information to understand this type of supernova, a path is opened to study these systems with the new generation of radio instruments, such as the Square Kilometre Array Observatory in the future.”

Scientists from The University of Manchester and used crowd sourced data to simulate radio leakage from mobile towers to determine what alien civilisations might detect from various nearby stars, including Barnard's star, six light years away from Earth.

The research, published in the  journal, found that only more technologically advanced civilisations would be able to detect the current levels of mobile tower radio leakage from Earth. However, as most alien civilisations are likely to have more sensitive receiving systems and as we move towards more powerful broadband systems on Earth, the detectability of humans from other intelligent beings will become more and more likely.

Professor Mike Garrett, Team Leader of the project and Director of at The University of Manchester, said: “I’ve heard many colleagues suggest that the Earth has become increasingly radio quiet in recent years - a claim that I always contested.

“Although it’s true we have fewer powerful TV and radio transmitters today, the proliferation of mobile communication systems around the world is profound. While each system represents relatively low radio powers individually, the integrated spectrum of billions of these devices is substantial.

“Current estimates suggest we will have more than one hundred thousand satellites in low Earth orbit and beyond before the end of the decade. The Earth is already anomalously bright in the radio part of the spectrum; if the trend continues, we could become readily detectable by any advanced civilisation with the right technology”.

The models, which demonstrate the signals that aliens may receive from Earth, were generated by Ramiro Saide, an intern at the ���Բ��ٳܳپ��Dz�’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory and M.Phil student at The University of Mauritius.

The simulations also show that the Earth’s mobile radio signature includes a substantial contribution from developing countries, including Africa, which the scientists say is an exciting development and highlights its success in bypassing the landline stage of development and moving directly into the digital age.

Dr Nalini Heeralall-Issur, Saide’s supervisor and Associate Professor at the University of Mauritius, said: “Every day we learn more about the characteristics of exoplanets via space missions like Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, with further insights from the James Webb Space Telescope. I believe that there’s every chance advanced civilisations are out there, and some may be capable of observing the human-made radio leakage coming from planet Earth.”

Next, the research team is keen to extend their research to include other contributors to the Earth’s radio leakage signature, such as powerful civilian and military radars, new digital broadcast systems, Wi-Fi networks, individual mobile handsets and the swarm of satellite constellations now being launched into low Earth orbit, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink system. 

On 25 April, University colleagues and friends came together to celebrate the 100th birthday of Sir Francis Graham-Smith FRS, FRAS, FInstP. 

Sir Francis, or Graham as he is known to friends and colleagues, was the second Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory, taking over from Sir Bernard Lovell when he retired in 1981, and he has had a remarkable career in astronomy.

It began as a student working at the University of Cambridge alongside Martin Ryle. There he played a key role in pioneering the new science of radio astronomy, providing some of the most accurate positions for the newly discovered sources of cosmic radio waves. 

In 1964, he was appointed as a Professor of Radio Astronomy at The University of Manchester and moved to Jodrell Bank. He worked on some early space-based radio astronomy experiments as well as ground-based detection of cosmic rays. 

However, when pulsars were discovered by Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish at Cambridge in 1967, his focus switched immediately to these new and important phenomena. Their study, using the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank and others, was to occupy much of the remainder of his career. 

Graham has continued to be an active member of Jodrell Bank’s pulsar research group, completing the latest edition of the research text ‘Pulsar Astronomy’ in his 99th year! 

The Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, said, “We are greatly indebted to Graham's sustained leadership to promote UK astronomy. It's wonderful that he is still with us to appreciate the amazing progress in pulsar studies that he helped to initiate. All good wishes for the second century!”

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester passed on her best wishes: “Happy birthday Sir Francis and thank you for all you have done for 91ֱ�� and for astronomy globally’.&�Բ�����;

Professor Andrew Lyne, FRS, Director of Jodrell Bank Observatory from 1999 to 2006, and himself a renowned pulsar researcher, added, “Graham is a supreme physicist and astronomer and has been a wonderful leader in the Observatory, the University and the country". 

In 1970, Graham was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. He then became Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1975 before returning to Jodrell Bank to take over as Director in 1981. From 1975 to 1977, he was President of the Royal Astronomical Society and, from 1982 to 1990, he was Astronomer Royal. He received a knighthood in 1986. 

Outside his work in research and scientific management, Graham has always been a strong supporter of and participant in public engagement with science. For example, he delivered the 1965 Royal Institution Christmas Lecture alongside fellow radio astronomers Sir Bernard Lovell, Sir Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish and - amongst many other activities including writing popular books and research-level texts - he played a significant role in the development and management of the public visitor centre at Jodrell Bank. He is also a keen gardener and beekeeper. 

Selected recent books 

•  (Lyne, A. G., Graham-Smith, F., Stappers, B. (CUP, 2022)).  
•  (Burke, B. F., Graham-Smith, F., Wilkinson, P. N. (CUP, 2019)).  
•  (Graham-Smith, F. (OUP, 2016)).  
•  (Graham-Smith, F. (OUP, 2013)).

Selected research papers 

•  (Ryle, M., Smith, F. G., Nature (1949)). 
•  (Smith, F. G., Nature (1951)). 
•  (Jelley, J. V. et al (1965)). 
•  (Lyne, A. G., Smith, F. G., Graham, D. A., MNRAS (1971)). 
•  (Lyne, A. G., Pritchard, R. S., Smith, F. G., MNRAS (1988)).  
•  (Lyne, A. G., Shemar, S. L., Smith, F. Graham, MNRAS (2000)). 

Recent interviews 

• (Jodcast from 2016). 
• (Jodcast from 2015). 
   

"" by Yodatheoak is licensed under

The is a result of the international collaboration and is transitioning radio astronomy language from specific terms, such as FRI (Fanaroff-Riley Type 1), to plain English terms such as “hourglass” or “traces host galaxy”.

In astronomy, technical terminology is used to describe specific ideas in efficient ways that are easily understandable amongst professional astronomers. However, this same terminology can also become a barrier to including non-experts in the conversation. The RGZ EMU collaboration is building a project on the citizen science platform, which asks the public for help in describing and categorising galaxies imaged through a radio telescope.

Modern astronomy projects collect so much data that it is often impossible for scientists to look at it all by themselves, and a computer analysis can still miss interesting things easily spotted by the human eye. 

Micah Bowles, Lead author and RGZ EMU data scientist, said: “Using AI to make scientific language more accessible is helping us share science with everyone. With the plain English terms we derived, the public can engage with modern astronomy research like never before and experience all the amazing science being done around the world.” 
 

Radio telescopes work in a very similar way to satellite dishes, but instead of picking up television signals they can be used to pick up the radio light generated by very energetic astrophysical objects - such as black holes in other galaxies. For many decades, these "radio galaxies” have been categorised into different types by astronomers to help them understand the origins and evolution of the Universe.

Recently, dramatic improvements to radio telescopes around the world have revealed more and more of these radio galaxies, not only making it impossible for professional astronomers to look at each one individually and categorise it, but also introducing new variations that aren’t already captured by existing radio galaxy types. Instead of trying to invent more and more new technical terminology for different types of radio galaxy – and train people to recognise them - the RGZ EMU team saw a different path forward that would enable citizen scientists to participate more fully in their research project. 

The RGZ EMU team first asked experts to describe a selection of radio galaxies with their technical terms, and then asked non-experts to describe them in plain English. Using a first of its kind AI based approach developed by the team, they then identified the plain English descriptions which carried the most scientific information. These descriptions, or “tags”, can now be used by anyone to describe radio galaxies — in a way which is meaningful for any English speaker — without any specialist training at all. This work will not only be crucial for the RGZ EMU project, but with ever increasing volumes of data across many areas of science this new AI approach could find use in many more situations where simplified language can accelerate research, collaboration and communication.  

Led from 91ֱ��, this research was conducted by researchers from the UK, China, Germany, the USA, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, and Pakistan. The data, code and results are all available .

Radio pulsars are spinning neutron stars from which we can observe flashes of radio waves in the manner of light pulses from a lighthouse. With masses of about one and a half times the mass of the Sun, and sizes of only about 25 km, neutron stars are the densest stars known. They rotate extremely fast, typically once every thousandth of a second to once every ten seconds, only gradually slowing down as they age.

Now, a team of collaborative astronomers have published the largest pulsar survey ever in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Neutron stars are also the strongest magnets in the Universe, on average a million times stronger than the strongest magnet on Earth. Such extreme properties present an opportunity to test the laws of physics with exceptionally high accuracy. Even 60 years after their discovery, fundamental questions about the nature of these exotic objects remain.

No two pulsars are the same, and headway in these exciting areas of physics requires sensitive observations of as many pulsars as possible.  The `Thousand Pulsar Array' (TPA) project is an international collaboration aimed at pursuing these aims by exploiting the unprecedented sensitivity of the MeerKAT radio telescope. This consists of 64 antennas in the Karoo desert in South Africa, and is a stepping stone towards the Square Kilometre Array, in which the UK has leadership.

The findings are published in two parts, one of which is led by researchers at The University of Manchester, which details the findings of the study of over one million individual flashes recorded. The sequence of flashes can be visualised as a train of pulses.

Dr Patrick Weltevrede of The University of Manchester said: “Observing a pulsar is like checking the pulse of a pulsar, revealing the particularities of its ‘heartbeat’. Each individual pulse is different in shape and strength.”

For some pulsars ordered patterns of diagonal stripes appear when visualised. Dr Xiaoxi Song, PhD student at The University of Manchester explains: “The superb quality of the TPA data and our sophisticated analysis allowed us to reveal these patterns for many pulsars for the first time. These patterns can be explained by the lightning storms swirling around the star. The findings point to something fundamental about how pulsars operate.”

After the pulsar is born, the lightning storms swirl around the star fast and chaotically. After a few million years, the lightning storms settle down and the patterns become slower and steadier. This turns out to be the opposite of what models predict. Eventually, after a few billion years the lightning will stop altogether, and pulsars will no longer be detectable.

The MeerKAT team recently received the prestigious Group Award of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the TPA project has now reached an extraordinary milestone: detailed observations of over 1200 pulsars, representing more than 1/3rd of the known pulsars.

In accompanying work, led by researchers at the University of Oxford, the statistical properties of the pulse shapes are presented. Dr Bettina Posselt explains: “We find that the most important property governing the radio emission of a pulsar is its so-called spin-down power. It quantifies the energy set free by a neutron star each second as its rotation slows down. Some of this spin-down power is used to produce the observed radio waves.”

Models predict that the ionised gas surrounding the star continuously discharges in what can be compared to lightning storms, producing the radio pulses. The new data indicate that the spin-down power influences how high above the neutron star surface the radio emission takes place and how much energy the charged particles are endowed with. Since there is evidence that the spin-down power decreases with age, and the 1200 pulsars exhibit large variety in spin-down power, the TPA data are ideal to study the ageing of neutron stars. The new data shows that even pulsars with the least spin-down power emit intense radio emission and can be detected up to large distances. This result suggests there may be a larger population of pulsars yet to be discovered than previously expected.

The TPA data from both projects are now publicly available. They enable the international community to pursue further studies both on the properties of these pulsars and those of the intervening interstellar space.

The `Thousand Pulsar Array’ team includes researchers from the UK, Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and South Africa.

MeerKAT is a radio telescope consisting of 64 antennas in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. The recipients of the award include institutions from South Africa, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, the USA, France, Australia and Germany. The University of Manchester is a leading contributor to the success of the MeerKAT project.

After more than a decade of development and four years of operations, the MeerKAT team have, in a short time, achieved remarkable advances in radio astronomy. Among many breakthrough observations, the MeerKAT images of the Galactic Centre region revealed for the first time the amazing large-scale radio bubbles and the evidence of a common origin for these bubbles.

MeerKAT has discovered one of the slowest radio emitting neutron stars known, revealed a huge population of pulsars in globular clusters, and found many interesting fast radio bursts. The million pulses detected from a thousand pulsars are revealing significant new detail on the way in which these extreme objects shine. For cosmological studies it has been used to measure the density of neutral hydrogen at billions of light years distance, employing a relatively novel technique known as intensity mapping

As well as the extensive scientific output, MeerKAT has supported an intensive programme of human capital development in Africa and helped train the next generation of radio astronomers. It has also played an essential role in stress-testing the technology for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the super sensitive international radio telescope that is currently under construction. More than 1,000 scholarships have been awarded to science and engineering students in South Africa and the broader African continent, to prepare the next generation of scientists for MeerKAT and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Many of the recipients of this programme are now emerging researchers and lead authors on MeerKAT publications.

At The University of Manchester, research teams led by Professor Stappers and contributions from members of other research teams such as Professors Scaife, Grainge, Breton, O’Brien and Drs, Keith, Weltevrede, Wolz, Bull, and Williams. The data is also facilitating strong collaborations with institutions globally and in Africa and training a generation of excellent students who are making vital contributions to the science productivity of the observatory.

“Our research with MeerKAT covers areas as diverse as explosive astrophysical transients, deep radio galaxy surveys and the discovery and precise timing of radio pulsars,” comments Professor Ben Stappers, Head of Pulsars, Exoplanets and Transients group at The University of Manchester.   

Professor Anna Scaife said: "The MeerKAT telescope has demonstrated beyond a doubt the world-leading science that can be produced from this new generation of radio instrumentation, as well as the skill of the African scientists and engineers who have made it possible."

Previous winners of the RAS group achievement award include the Event Horizon Telescope Project, The Planck team, The LIGO team and the Oxford-led Zooniverse project.

SARAO have issued a statement of gratitude for the award at: [URL to come]

The award is made to a significant number of institutions worldwide which have contributed to the transformational success of the telescope:

This is a window of observation not previously explored, which provides complementary information to that obtained previously by space mission (Planck and WMAP) dedicated to the study of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the fossil radiation left behind by the Big Bang. The new results allow us to obtain information about the structure of the magnetic field of our Galaxy, as well as helping to understand the energetic processes which took place close to the birth of the present Universe.

The QUIJOTE experiment is sited at the Teide Observatory (Izaña, Tenerife) and comprises two telescopes, each of 2.5m diameter which observe the sky in the microwave range (10- 40 GHz). Led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) this experiment started observing in 2012.

Now, thanks to the data obtained with its multifrequency instrument MFI, which was working until 2018, a team of scientists has presented a set of six articles in the specialised journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) which give the most accurate description until now of the polarisation in the microwave emission processes in our galaxy.

“These maps give a detailed description in a new frequency range, from 10 to 20 GHz, complementary to those from space missions which have previously observed the sky at microwaves, such as Planck (ESA) y WMAP (NASA)”, comments José Alberto Rubiño, the scientist in charge of QUIJOTE, and Principal Investigator of the European project RADIOFOREGROUNDS.

“We have characterised the synchrotron emission from our Galaxy with unprecedented accuracy. This radiation is the result of the emission by charged particles moving at velocities close to that of light within the Galactic magnetic field. These maps, the result of almost 9,000 hours of observation, are a unique tool for studying magnetism in the universe” he adds.

The CMB is a fossil radiation which originated during the first instants of the universe, and which we observe today at radio wavelength. This type of radiation is studied by scientists because “by studying the properties of its polarisation we hope to find an indirect clue to the existence of gravitational waves after the Big Bang” comments Ricardo Génova-Santos (IAC), a member of the science team.

91ֱ�� started the scientific collaboration with MRAO (Cambridge), IAC (Tenerife) and IFCA (Santander) in the mid 80's with the Tenerife experiment to study the Cosmic Microwave Experiment from the Spanish Teide Observatory, which went on to create the Very Small Array (VSA), the EU RADIOFOREGROUNDS project and QUIJOTE.

The optical and horn design for QUIJOTE was carried out in 91ֱ��, including local manufacturing work. 91ֱ�� apart from providing some of the day-to-day remote observing also helped develop a parallel data processing and mapping pipeline during the commissioning phase. For the final data products, we provided the atmospheric correction and some of assessment of AMI and synchrotron emission.

Dr Robert Watson from The University of Manchester said: "These data will greatly improve our knowledge of the microwave emission mechanisms of our own galaxy which is proving to be messier and more interesting than expected. This will also help in predicting the galactic foreground emission for future higher frequency CMB experiments".

To measure the signals from the origin of the universe, the scientists need to eliminate the veil of emission associated with our own Galaxy. The new maps provided by QUIJOTE are a tool for performing this task. “One of the most interesting results we have found is that the polarised synchrotron emission from our Galaxy is much more variable than had been thought” comments Elena de la Hoz, a researcher at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA). “The results we have obtained are a reference to help future experiments make reliable detections of the cosmological signal” she adds.

The new data from QUIJOTE are also a unique tool for studying the anomalous microwave emission (AME), a type of emission first detected 25 years ago, which is thought to be produced by the rotation of very small particles of dust in the interstellar medium, which tend to be oriented by the presence of the Galactic magnetic field.

Finally, the new maps from QUIJOTE have permitted the systematic study of over 700 sources of emission in radio and microwaves, of both Galactic and extragalactic origin. “For some 40 of these sources in which polarised emission has been detected, study of their properties gives agreement with the predictions of existing models in the literature” comments Diego Herranz, a researcher at IFCA.

QUIJOTE is the result of a scientific Collaboration between the IAC, IFCA, the Department of Engineering and Communications (Santander), the Jodrell Bank Observatory of the University of Manchester, the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge) and the IDOM company.

from Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope has shown there were at least two, and possibly three, unseen stars that crafted the oblong, curvy shapes of the captivating images release of the .

Plus, for the first time, by pairing Webb’s infrared images with existing data from ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Gaia observatory, researchers were able to precisely pinpoint the mass of the central star before it created the nebula.

A planetary nebula forms when a star like the Sun reached the end of its life. It ejects much of its material back into space. How this happens is still a bit of a mystery. We see stars just reaching the phase where they start this ejection: an example is the star aptly named ‘Mira’ (’wonderful’) which has been proposed as one of the candidates for the star of Bethlehem. We can see planetary nebulae: around 3000 are known in the Galaxy. But we do not directly observe the ejection itself.

The international collaboration of astronomers have published new calculations in Nature Astronomy, which show the central star was nearly three times the mass of the Sun before it ejected its layers of gas and dust. After those ejections, it now measures about 60 percent of the mass of the Sun. Knowing the initial mass is a critical piece of evidence that helped the team reconstruct the scene and project how the shapes in this nebula may have been created.

Professor of Astrophysics , The University of Manchester said: “JWST has revealed details of the death of stars which we had never expected. The ring of dust with the mass of the Earth was a complete surprise. This star did not die alone: its companions left their imprint in nebula.”

The study has shown that the ejection is even more mysterious than was already known.  The team has been able to measure a very precise mass for the original star: 2.8 times the mass of the Sun. This is by far the most accurate ancestral mass of a planetary nebula ever measured.

The star has a distant companion which is slightly less massive: it is a double star. The star that ejected the mass is found to have a disk of gas around it, with a mass a bit less than that of Earth. How this disk formed is not clear: it may be a remnant of a system of planets, or it may have been caught from the ejection itself. The disk has a gap in it. This suggests that there is a third, small star, which orbits in this gap. A spiral structure in the nebula also indicates the presence of this star, where the spiral formed from the orbit.

The planetary nebula has a large number of small clouds (‘globules’) in it, each the size of the solar system. The team estimates that there are more than 10,000 of these, which have formed in the ejection process. There is an outer ring which surrounds both stars.

The team finds evidence for jets that have come from the central system, and which may require a fourth star or massive planet, even closer to the remnant star. That fourth star may have been swallowed by the ancestor of the planetary nebula during the ejection, in a phase of stellar cannibalism. The team calls it a ‘messy’ stellar system!

This study opens the door to a much better understanding of how stars like the Sun die. They hope to study more such nebulae; JWST has a unique power to show details of the nebulae which even HST could not see.  JWST shows that the death of a star can produce beauty – and science.

With new investment, six UK universities will deliver a major upgrade to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment known as Simons Observatory (SO).

The CMB is the trail of heat left by the Big Bang, and studying its tiny fluctuations help scientists to understand how the Universe was formed.

The University of Manchester is the lead institute on the SO:UK project. One of the two telescope receivers will be assembled and tested at the University, while one of the SO:UK telescope mounts will be installed at Jodrell Bank Observatory. Both of the receivers will in turn be installed on the mount at Jodrell Bank for full system verification tests before being shipped to the observing site in Chile. In addition, The University of Manchester will host the SO:UK data centre and will play a major role in the pipeline development work.  

SO is a ground-based telescope on a mountain 5200m (17,000 feet) above the Atacama Desert in Chile. Prior to the new UK contribution, SO was comprised of a single large aperture telescope and three small aperture telescopes.  Together, they will make precise and detailed observations of the CMB, the heat left over from the hot, early days of the history of the Universe.

Tiny fluctuations in the CMB radiation tell us about fluctuations in how matter was distributed shortly after the Big Bang, which are the initial seeds of all structure in the Universe. 91ֱ��ing the CMB gives clues about both the origin of structure, and how the initial matter fluctuations have grown over time to form the structure of the Universe we know now.

Observations with SO promise to provide these breakthrough discoveries that will help us understand how the Big Bang led to the formation of stars and galaxies.

The two types of telescope on SO will do two different jobs. The small aperture telescopes are focussed on searching for signatures of primordial gravitational waves. If detected, this signal would open a unique observational window on physics at very early times, and at ultra-high energies.

The large aperture telescope will address a range of unsolved questions including the nature of neutrinos and other relativistic species, the nature of dark matter, and the physics giving rise to the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe.

The international project is led by the US, supported by the Simons Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation, and includes 85 institutes from 13 countries.

Starting this month, the six universities delivering the major new UK contribution are:

• Cambridge 
• Cardiff 
• Imperial College London 
• 91ֱ��
• Oxford  
• Sussex

With £18 million funding from UK Research and Innovation, , the UK will be leading on two additional telescopes providing a major increase in the sensitivity of the facility, along with UK expertise in data processing and analysis.

The UK lead, Professor Michael Brown, of The University of Manchester, said: “SO is poised to become the leading CMB project of the 2020s. It will address some of the most profound questions in all of science. With this major new funding, UK scientists will continue to play a world-leading role at the forefront of this high-profile science area.”

Dr Colin Vincent, Associate Director for Astronomy at STFC, said: “This major investment by UKRI will allow UK researchers to spearhead discoveries alongside partners in this international facility, uncovering the secrets from the very dawn of time.”

Recognising that radio surveys targeting nearby stars are also sensitive to background cosmic objects, in particular galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters, Prof. Michael Garrett at The University of Manchester, collaborating with Berkeley SETI Director Dr Andrew Siemion (who is also a Visiting Professor at 91ֱ��) have been able to place new limits on the prevalence of very powerful transmitters in galaxies and other cosmic objects located outside of our own Milky Way. 

They focused on previous observations made by the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) looking at 469 Breakthrough Listen target fields that were located away from the obscuring gas and dust in the plane of our own Milky Way. In these fields they identify more than 140000 extragalactic systems, including various astrophysical exotica: interacting galaxies, various types of active galactic nuclei, radio galaxies, and several gravitational lens systems.

Most of these sources are located at cosmological distances, but the inventory also includes several nearby galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters. Although these systems are located many millions of light years away, if the strength of technosignatures follow an approximate power-law distribution (as transmitters here on Earth do), there might be a few rare but very bright signals that are detectable.

Nearby galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters are a great place to look for these rare powerful signals, as these systems contain hundreds of billions of stars and many of these will host potentially habitable planets. Since the original Breakthrough Listen surveys did not detect any technosignatures, Garrett & Siemion were able to place constraints on the luminosity function of potential extraterrestrial transmitters and limits on the prevalence of very powerful transmitters associated with the billions of stars comprising these systems have also been determined. 

For some time Garrett has been troubled that previous SETI surveys have not accounted for the fact that a radio telescope’s field of view also includes many distant background objects, in addition to the nearby target star - he believes that “SETI radio surveys place stronger limits on the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the distant Universe than is often fully appreciated”. 

Siemion notes that, “the Breakthrough Listen programme is also targeting 100 nearby galaxies but in the future we will be specifically observing large concentrations of stars at cosmological distances to further probe for very bright, very rare technosignatures.” 

The paper, “Constraints on extragalactic transmitters via Breakthrough Listen observations of background sources”, has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. A preprint and supplementary material, including figures, are available at .

The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO) will help shepherd in a new era of gravitational wave science. Deployed across two antipodal locations to fully cover the sky, GOTO will scour the skies for optical clues about the violent cosmic events that create ripples in the fabric of space itself.

GOTO began when the UK’s University of Warwick and Australia’s Monash University wanted to address the gap between gravitational wave (GW) detectors and electromagnetic signals. Now the international collaboration has 10 partners, 6 of which are in the UK.

The primary science of GOTO is to detect the optical light connected to gravitational wave events. As part of the overall GOTO activity, The University of Manchester will be using the new telescope to help its astronomers search for unique ‘spider’ pulsars, the name for very fast spinning binary pulsars.

For the gravitational wave science, GOTO needs to scan a large area of the sky repeatedly, both to find these events as they occur but also to build a very accurate reference of what the sky ‘normally’ looks like so that if a gravitational wave counterpart appears one can tell it was not there before. The ability of GOTO will allow researchers to produce extended time-lapses of the sky, which can then be mined for all kinds of other variable sources.

Professor Rene Breton of The University of Manchester, one of the GOTO project partners, says that the science return also goes beyond gravitational waves. “The ‘time-lapse’ picture of the sky it continuously builds up is a gold mine to study variability in other astronomical objects and search for transient phenomena unconnected to gravitational wave events,” he said.

“In our specific case, we're after discovering new by looking for the periodic signature of the heated star orbiting them. Some display unexpected changes and brighten up as mass suddenly start flowing from the companion star towards the pulsar. We don't understand this behaviour as it occurs quickly (somewhere between days to weeks) and has only been observed a couple of times. Having "eyes" scanning the sky is exactly what we think could help us uncover their secrets.”

GOTO has received £3.2 million of funding from the (STFC) to deploy the full-scale facility.

Long hypothesised as a by-product of the collision and merger of cosmic behemoths such as neutron stars and black holes, gravitational waves were finally detected directly by the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory) in 2015.

GOTO is designed to fill this observational gap by searching for optical signals in the electromagnetic spectrum that might indicate the source of the GW – quickly locating the source and using that information to direct a fleet of telescopes, satellites and instruments at it.

As most GW signals involve the merger of massive objects, these ‘visual’ cues are extremely fleeting as must be located as quickly as possible, which is where GOTO comes in.

The idea is that GOTO will act as sort of intermediary between the likes of LIGO, which detect the presence of a gravitational wave event, and more targetable multi-wavelength observatories that can study the event’s optical source.

Professor Danny Steeghs of the University of Warwick, GOTO’s Principle Investigator, said: “There are fleets of telescopes all over the world available to look towards the skies when gravitational waves are detected, in order to find out more about the source. But as the gravitational wave detectors are not able to pinpoint where the ripples come from, these telescopes do not know where to look.”

“If the gravitational wave observatories are the ears, picking up the sounds of the events, and the telescopes are the eyes, ready to view the event in all the wavelengths, then GOTO is the bit in the middle, telling the eyes where to look.”

Following the successful testing of a prototype system in La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands, the project is deploying a much expanded, second generation instrument.

Two telescope mount systems, each made up of eight individual 40 cm (16 inch) telescopes, are now operational in La Palma. Combined, these 16 telescopes cover a very large field of view with 800 million pixels across their digital sensors, enabling the array to sweep the visible sky every few nights.

These robotic systems will operate autonomously, patrolling the sky continuously but also focusing on particular events or regions of sky in response to alerts of potential gravitational wave events.

In parallel, the team is preparing a site at Australia’s Siding Spring Observatory, which will contain the same two-mount, 16 telescope system as the La Palma installation.

The plan is to have both sites operational this year to be ready for the next observing run of the LIGO/Virgo gravitational wave detectors in 2023.

The optical search for gravitational wave events is the next step in the evolution of gravitational wave astronomy. It has been achieved once before, but with GOTO’s help it should become much easier.

Dr Mike Walmsley of The University of Manchester will present the new work, describing how this “cyborg” approach measured the shapes of millions of galaxies.

Galaxies live a chaotic life. Collisions with other galaxies and bursts of energy from supermassive black holes disrupt the colours and orbits of billions of stars, leaving tell-tale markers that volunteers search for on the Galaxy Zoo website. But understanding exactly which cosmic events lead to which markers requires millions of measured images - more than humans could ever search.

To help, Dr  Walmsley called on ‘’, a project which recruits hundreds of thousands of volunteers to measure the morphology (shapes) of millions of galaxies.

A decade of Galaxy Zoo volunteer measurements (totalling over 96 million clicks) was used to create an automatic assistant - a new AI algorithm. The algorithm, affectionately named “Zoobot”, can not only accurately predict what volunteers would say but understands where it might be mistaken.

The discovery of 40,000 rare ring-shaped galaxies is six times more than previously known. Rings take billions of years to form and are destroyed in galaxy-galaxy collisions, and so this giant new sample will help reveal how isolated galaxies evolve. The dataset will also tell scientists how galaxies age more generally.

Zoobot is designed to be retrained again and again for new science goals. Just like a musician can learn a new instrument faster than their first instrument, Zoobot can learn to answer new shape questions easily because it has already learned to answer more than 50 different questions. Dr Walmsley says: “through Zoobot, Galaxy Zoo volunteers will be helping other astronomers solve questions we never thought to ask”.

An international team of astronomers from around the globe taking part in the project named, (CO Mapping Array Project) will offer us a new glimpse into this epoch of galaxy assembly, helping to answer questions about what really caused the universe’s rapid increase in the production of stars.

Led by and involving researchers from The University of Manchester, the first science results from the project have just been published in in . Based on observations taken one year into a planned five-year survey, COMAP set upper limits on how much cold gas must be present in galaxies at the epoch studied, including the ones that are normally too faint and dusty to see.

While the project has not yet made a direct detection of the carbon monoxide signal, these early results demonstrate that it is on-track to do so by the end of the initial five-year survey and to ultimately paint the most comprehensive picture yet of the universe’s history of star formation.

Alongside the main cosmology goals of the telescope, scientists in 91ֱ�� have been focused on using the telescope to make new maps of the Milky Way. Improving on work by the WMAP and Planck space telescopes, the COMAP Galactic Plane Survey maps the Galaxy at a resolution of 4.5 arcminutes, around seven times finer than Planck.

The University of Manchester COMAP team is based in the and is led by Professor Clive Dickinson. Jodrell Bank is a world leader in radio astronomy-related research and technology development.

Thomas Rennie, PhD student at The University of Manchester said: “We are really proud to present a first look at the COMAP Galactic Plane Survey - a survey which hopefully will continue to serve the scientific community for years to come. Mapping the Galaxy at 30GHz, at a resolution never seen before,  offers us insights into the births and deaths of stars in addition to letting us probe emission from spinning dust grains across the Galactic Plane in a way we have never been able to do before.

"Making these observations come with challenges, mainly as the atmosphere is not clear at 30 GHz like it is by eye. At these frequencies, the atmosphere will absorb radiation from space, and turbulence high in the atmosphere make all our observations noisier. It’s like trying to look outside through a cold window. All the condensation makes everything look clouded and confused, and it’s up to us to work out a way of making the window look clear again.”

The COMAP Galactic Plane Survey, estimated for completion in 2023/2024 will be the first large-scale dedicated radio continuum and Radio Recombination Line survey at 30 GHz. This means that not only are astronomers able to make maps of how the Milky Way appears, but it’s also possible to make specific maps of hydrogen running through the Galaxy.

The choice of 30GHz for the survey lends itself to a wide range of uses; from understanding the births of stars in Galactic Hii regions (which appear as bubbles of hydrogen gas) to examining the exploded remains of dead stars in supernova remnants. Finally astronomers are even able to survey the fingerprints of spinning dust emission by mapping the mysterious anomalous microwave emission - thought to come from spinning dust grains.

The project has received funding from the Keck Institute for Space Studies (for critical early technology development) and from the National Science Foundation (NSF), for building the Pathfinder and performing the survey. The project is a collaboration between Caltech, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, New York University, Princeton University, Stanford University, Université de Genève, University of Oslo, The University of Manchester, University of Maryland, and University of Miami. 

91ֱ�� COMAP team: 

Prof Clive Dickinson (91ֱ�� PI, JBCA, Department of Physics and Astronomy) 
Dr Stuart Harper (PDRA, JBCA, Department of Physics and Astronomy) 
Mr Thomas Rennie (PhD student, JBCA, Department of Physics and Astronomy)

The sun shone as guests were welcomed to The University of Manchester’s iconic Jodrell Bank site and invited to tour the new building. The Pavilion had been years in the making and followed Jodrell Bank’s formal recognition as a site of Outstanding Universal Value when it was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2019.

The unqiue structure is a 76m diameter grass-topped dome that mirrors the shape and scale of the dish of the Lovell Telescope. Created to open up the site’s inspirational heritage, inside houses a state-of-the-art permanent exhibition on the pioneering stories of Jodrell Bank, and a 130-seat immersive auditorium.

After exploring the stunning new attraction, guests gathered for a series of speeches and a joyous plaque unveiling ceremony in the First Light Café.

Speaking at the ceremony, Her Excellency Laura Davies said “What an absolute privilege to officially open the First Light Pavilion here at Jodrell Bank, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that brings science, education and culture together like no other.”

She also congratulated the team behind the project saying “You’ve all contributed to something extraordinary which will endure and open minds across generations and countries.”

David Renwick, Director, England, North, The National Lottery Heritage Fund also spoke at the event, thanking National Lottery players for raising funds for the project. “We’re delighted to have supported the opening of the First Light Pavilion, something we couldn’t have done without National Lottery players. We’re sure that this state-of-the-art visitor attraction will delight and inspire all of its visitors, including the next generation of scientists and engineers to follow in the footsteps of Sir Bernard Lovell.”

Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chanceller of The University of Manchester who also spoke at the event, has commented “This bold and ambitious project has been a great success. It is a huge testament to Professor Teresa Anderson and her staff and many others within the University for their amazing work.”

After Her Excellency Laura Davies had unveiled a plaque marking the special occasion, guests were then invited to witness the first alignment of the Pavilion’s meridian line. A brass-lined glass cutaway in the building’s façade reveals the light of the sun as it shines through and across the floor of the entrance. At 13:11, local astronomical noon on the summer solstice, the sunlight aligned to a central marker just as planned, and involuntary cheers and applause rang out.

Teresa Anderson, Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Engagement has spearheaded the project throughout and said of the occasion “It was wonderful to celebrate our journey towards the First Light Pavilion with so many partners and supporters on the Summer Solstice. It’s a project that has involved an incredible team of creative, skilled and committed people, all of whom have put their hearts into it. The result something really special and unique – there is nothing like it anywhere in the world - and it will stand at Jodrell Bank for generations to come, offering people of all ages a chance to be inspired by our place in the Universe.”

First Light at Jodrell Bank is supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, The UK Government (DCMS), The University of Manchester, and a number of kind donors including The Wolfson, Garfield Weston, Denise Coates, and Stavros Niarchos foundations.

Jodrell Bank is open to visitors Tuesdays – Sundays, 10am – 5pm with last admission at 3:30pm. Tickets include access to the new Pavilion and are priced at £12 for adults and £8 for children. Find out more at

Based on leading research and expertise on innovative and emerging technologies, experts are calling for sustainability to be at the forefront of humanity’s next phase of space exploration. In On Space, experts ask policymakers to consider space debris, satellite orbits and the investment needed to roll out sustainable space technology on Earth.

Many technologies used to counter climate change, including solar panels, started out as space-age innovations. Future innovations in space technology could be used to further reduce carbon emissions here on Earth.

Dr Aled Roberts explains one of the biggest challenges for off-world habitat construction is the transportation of building materials, which can cost upwards of £1m per brick. A solution could be that ‘local’ resources, such as Lunar or Martian soil, are used to make building materials. , researched at The University of Manchester, is a material is made from bio-based materials and the local planetary soil to make sturdy bricks that can be used to build space habitats.

On the use of this technology on Earth, Aled said: “Given that the construction sector accounts for 39% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, any relatively green construction material technology developed for off-world habitats could be employed as a sustainable alternative on Earth.”

Researchers also stress the need to take care of space, particularly around the Earth’s orbit. Of the 23,000 objects regularly being tracked in orbit by radar, around 15% are active satellites, the rest is space debris.

As more commercial satellites are launched, such as SpaceX’s Starlink satellite cluster, the potential for space debris increases.

Dr Peter Roberts argues that one way to combat the problem of space debris is to coordinate International space policymakers to agree to for commercial operations to lessen humanity’s impact on the space environment. Higher level orbits should be reserved for science, crewed activities, and space exploration.

Professor Emma Bunce, President of the , said: “It is exciting to contemplate the future of the UK space sector, our use of space for the good of our planet, and its robotic and human exploration more widely. The ‘space age’ is still relatively young – just 60 years – but it is clear that our future and that of our planet will be reliant on space technology and the application of space-enabled data.”

As well as sustainability, On Space advocates for the use of advanced materials, such as graphene, in UK space technology, support for research and development into emerging space technologies in the UK and prioritising international collaborations in UK and international space policy.

On Space is available to read on .

The feat was achieved using the South African-based MeerKAT telescope, a precursor to the world’s largest radio observatory, the (SKAO), which will probe the Universe in unprecedented detail.

A primary aim for the SKAO is to understand the evolution and content of the Universe along with the mechanisms which drive its accelerating expansion. One way to achieve this is by observing the Universe's structure on the largest scales. On these scales, entire galaxies can be considered as single points and analysis of their distribution reveals clues about the nature of gravity and mysterious phenomena such as dark matter and dark energy.

Radio telescopes are a fantastic instrument for this since they can detect radiation at wavelengths of 21cm generated by neutral hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Universe. By analysing 3D maps of hydrogen spanning millions of light-years, we probe the total distribution of matter in the Universe.

The SKAO, which has its headquarters based at , Cheshire, is currently under construction. However, there are already pathfinder telescopes, such as the 64-dish array MeerKAT, in place to guide its design. Based in the Karoo Desert and operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), MeerKAT will eventually go on to be a part of the full SKAO.

MeerKAT and the SKAO will primarily operate as interferometers, where the array of dishes are combined as one giant telescope capable of imaging distant objects with high resolution. “However, the interferometer will not be sensitive enough to the largest scales most interesting for cosmologists studying the Universe.” explained the co-lead author of the new research paper, Steven Cunnington. “Therefore, we instead use the array as a collection of 64 individual telescopes which allows them to map the giant volumes of sky required for cosmology.”

The single-dish mode of operation has been driven by a team at the University of the Western Cape, with several observations already conducted with MeerKAT. This ambitious project involves many other institutions spanning four continents. In the new research released on and submitted for publication, a team which includes 91ֱ��-based astronomers Steven Cunnington, Laura Wolz and Keith Grainge, present the first ever cosmological detection using this single-dish technique.

The new detection is of a shared clustering pattern between MeerKAT's maps and galaxy positions determined by the optical Anglo-Australian Telescope. Since it is known that these galaxies trace the overall matter of the Universe, the strong statistical correlation between the radio maps and the galaxies shows the MeerKAT telescope is detecting large-scale cosmic structure. This is the first time such detection has been made using a multi-dish array operating as individual telescopes. The full SKAO will rely on this technique and this therefore marks an important milestone in the roadmap for the cosmology science case with the SKAO.

“This detection was made with just a small amount of pilot survey data,” revealed Steven Cunnington. “It’s encouraging to imagine what will be achieved as MeerKAT continues to make increasingly larger observations.

"For many years I have worked towards forecasting the future capability of the SKAO. To now reach a stage where we are developing the tools we will need and demonstrating their success with real data is incredibly exciting. This only marks the beginning of what we hope will be a continuous showcase of results which advances our understanding of the Universe.”

Galaxies are the largest single objects in the universe, and the origin of their formation is a very old question without any obvious answers. A major study submitted this week to the American Astronomical Society’s has provided a solution to this problem.

Astronomers led by Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy, Christopher Conselice at The University of Manchester, have now established that this effect of merging is one of the dominant processes whereby galaxies come to be.

These researchers have concluded this decades-long study of galaxies and how they formed over the past 10 billion years revealing that these galaxy mergers are one of the most important methods for forming galaxies. The average massive galaxy over the past 10 billion years will undergo around 3 mergers with other galaxies, which will more than doubles their mass. This study has thus shown that mergers are a very effective way for galaxies to form.

“This also suggests that our own Milky Way galaxy has likely undergone at least one of these significant mergers during its history, which radically changed its shape and formation history,” Said Professor Conselice. “Mergers, such as the ones in this study, trigger star formation, which may be the origin event for how stars including our own Sun formed, as well as feed the matter that grows central black holes.”

Galaxies in the nearby universe come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them, including our own, are very massive with over a trillion stars and a spiral pattern. Others are enormous collections of stars with a spheroidal or ellipsoidal structure with no particular patterns. The history of these enormous systems is largely unknown. 

One possible way in which galaxies can grow in mass is when two galaxies smash together to form an entirely new galaxy, a process known as merging.  Galaxy mergers have been known for over half a century, but their role in how we obtain the massive galaxies we see today has always been an enormous mystery and a fundamental question in cosmology.  While a favorite theoretical idea, we could previously only guess at how the process has actually occurred.

The result of this study originates from searching back 10 billion years for galaxies in close proximity, or those that are in ‘pairs’. These close galaxies will eventually merge together to form a new system over the course of a billion years. By catching these galaxies in the merger process, this study determined the merger history, and thus the formation history of galaxies in the universe. Before this study, mostly only theoretical estimates of this have been available. This study is a direct measurement of this process.

Conselice said, “Due to the total number of galaxies in the universe, over the past 10 billion years, about 2 trillion of these merger events would have occurred. Many of these events will be detectable with upcoming gravitational wave experiments as these are the most common massive coalescence events to occur in the universe."

This previously unknown history now allows us to understand galaxies in a way that we have not previously. Future work by this team and others will reveal the implications for this finding for understanding the development of new stars and black holes in galaxies over this cosmic epoch.

Other participants in the study are Carl Mundy and Leonardo Ferreira from the University of Nottingham and Kenneth Duncan from the University of Edinburgh.

Teresa Anderson, Director of Jodrell Bank Centre for Engagement said “It was a huge moment finally to welcome visitors to the First Light Pavilion and see all our hard work pay off. I’m delighted to have reached this milestone and grateful to everyone that supported us on this journey.”

The First Light Pavilion is a £21.5m development supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and has been years in the making. It follows Jodrell Bank’s recent recognition as a site of Outstanding Universal Value when it was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2019. The First Light Pavilion was created to tell the inspirational stories of Jodrell Bank’s world-leading contribution to science, heritage and culture.

Highlighting its global reach, the first visitor had travelled all the way from Boston, US.  Matt (pictured) had taken a red-eye flight arriving in 91ֱ�� that morning before driving straight to Jodrell Bank. An Atmospheric Science student at MIT, Jodrell Bank was also the 150^th World Heritage Site that he’s visited!

Others had come from right across the country including from Glasgow, Essex, Plymouth and Norwich. A visitor commented on the experience: “The whole day was marvellous, an experience I will never forget. Every moment was captivating and utterly enjoyable. From the initial welcome, to the beautifully designed and totally absorbing new Pavilion.”

Julia Riley, Head of Interpretation and Engagement was welcoming visitors into the building over the weekend “It was a delight to see people’s reactions to what we’ve created here at Jodrell Bank. Its just been so well received by everyone and its wonderful to see.”

The architecturally stunning building, created with international architect firm Hassell, takes the form of a grass-topped dome that cleverly mirrors the shape and scale of the dish of the famous Lovell Telescope. It also contains a meridian line, referencing the age-old tradition of building structures that align with the skies above us, much like other World Heritage Sites such as Stonehenge.

Inside the tardis-like building, is a new permanent exhibition which brings visitors into direct contact with huge sections of the authentic metal dish of the Lovell Telescope that has ‘listened’ to the skies since 1957. The exhibition, created by Casson Mann, tells the inspirational story of Jodrell Bank’s pioneering scientists and engineers. Through a range of fully interactive digital displays and projections, visitors are able to uncover archive materials brought together for the first time including audio, film, plans, photographs and more.

Eilish McGuinness, CEO of The National Lottery Heritage Fund said: “Jodrell Bank is a truly unique heritage site, of national and international importance. The National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £12.5m so that the site’s powerful human stories of curiosity, exploration and discovery could be shared with everyone”.

Every visitor also has the opportunity to experience an immersive audio-visual spectacle in the Pavilion’s Space Dome, a state-of-the-art auditorium complete with nine projectors and a giant curved screen. The Space Dome also hosts traditional planetarium-style shows ‘touring’ visitors around the stars and planets.

All this is in addition to everything that Jodrell Bank already has to offer and visitors can continue to get up close to the giant Lovell Telescope, enjoy a Telescope Talk, explore exhibitions on the mind-blowing science of Jodrell Bank, and enjoy the 35 acres of grounds at this stunning Cheshire attraction.

Jodrell Bank is open Tuesdays – Sundays, 10am – 5pm with last admission at 3:30pm. Tickets are priced at just £12 for adults and £8 for children. There are concession rates for over 65s and students, and under 4s go free. There are also discounts for family groups and options to add on extras too, including planetarium-style shows in the Space Dome. 

Find out more, including how to book at

The team, led by members of the ERC-funded (More Transients and Pulsars) group at The University of Manchester say it is a unique discovery as it resides in the neutron star graveyard where they do not expect to see any radio emission at all. The discovery was made using the in South Africa and published in the journal, .

The source was initially found from a single flash, or pulse, by the MeerTRAP instrument whilst piggybacking on imaging observations being led by a different team, ThunderKAT. MeerTRAP and ThunderKAT then worked closely together to puzzle out its origin. Combining the data from the two teams, it was then possible to confirm the pulsations and get an accurate position for the source, enabling detailed and more sensitive follow up observations.

Neutron stars are extremely dense remnants of a supernova explosion of a massive star. They can produce beams of radio waves which sweep around the sky as the neutron star spins, producing regular flashes like cosmic lighthouses.  Scientists currently know of about 3000 of these in our own Galaxy. However, the new discovery is unlike anything seen so far. The team think it could belong to the theorized class of ultra-long period magnetars with extremely strong magnetic fields.

Dr Manisha Caleb, formerly from The University of Manchester and now at the University of Sydney, who led the research said: “Amazingly we only detect radio emission from this source for 0.5% of its rotation period. This means that it is very fortuitous that the radio beam intersected with the Earth. It is therefore likely that there are many more of these very slowly spinning sources in the Galaxy which has important implications for how neutron stars are born and age.

“The majority of pulsar surveys do not search for periods this long and so we have no idea how many of these sources there might be. In this case the source was bright enough that we could detect the single pulses with the MeerTRAP instrument at MeerKAT.” 

The newly discovered neutron star is named, PSR J0901-4046, and shows characteristics of pulsars, (ultra-long period) magnetars and even fast radio bursts. While the radio energy produced suggests a pulsar origin, the pulses with chaotic sub-pulse components, and the polarization of the pulses are reminiscent of magnetars. 

While the spin period of PSR J0901−4046 might be more consistent with a white dwarf, another less extreme type of stellar remnant, scientists do not see any multi-wavelength support for this. It is presently unclear how long this source has been emitting in the radio. It was discovered in a well-studied part of the galaxy, but radio surveys don’t usually search for periods this long, or pulses that last more than a few tens of milliseconds.

“The radio emission from this neutron star is unlike any we have ever seen before,” explained Professor Ben Stappers at The University of Manchester and Principal Investigator of the MeerTRAP project. “We get to view it for about 300 milliseconds, which is much longer than for the majority of other radio emitting neutron stars. There seem to be at least 7 different pulse types, some of which show strongly periodic structure, which could be interpreted as seismic vibrations of the neutron star. These pulses might be giving us vital insight into the nature of the emission mechanism for these sources.”

“The sensitivity that MeerKAT provides, combined with the sophisticated searching that was possible with MeerTRAP and an ability to make simultaneous images of the sky made this discovery possible. Even then it took an eagle eye to recognise it for something that was possibly a real source because it was so unusual looking!” said Dr Ian Heywood from the ThunderKAT team and the University of Oxford who collaborated on this study.

Detecting similar sources is observationally challenging, which implies that there may be a larger undetected population waiting to be uncovered. This new discovery adds to the possibility of the existence of a new class of radio transients, the ultra-long period neutron stars, suggesting a possible connection to the evolution of highly magnetized neutron stars, ultra-long period magnetars, and fast radio bursts.

The paper, 'Discovery of a radio-emitting neutron star with an ultra-long spin period of 76s', is published in .

The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) is set to explore the evolution of the early Universe and delve into the role of some the earliest processes in fashioning galaxies like our own Milky Way, among many other science goals.

From its , the SKAO will oversee the delivery and operations of two cutting-edge, complementary arrays with 197 radio telescope dishes located in South Africa and more than 130,000 low-frequency antennas in Western Australia.

Professor Ben Stappers leads the 91ֱ�� team developing the Pulsar Search software. This programme will enable some of the most exciting SKAO experiments, testing General Relativity and aiming to detect Gravitational Waves.

The University of Manchester will also lead the development of the software for the Monitor, Control and Calibration System of the SKA-LOW telescope. This telescope will be an array of over 130,000 antennas, which will, amongst other experiments, detect the very first stars to be born in the Universe.

Underpinning these incredible instruments is the thinking power of its software system, telling the telescopes where to look and when, diagnosing any issues and translating the telescope signals into useable data from which discoveries can be made.

The UK has already played a vital role in the software for the telescopes during the design phase, and is now set to continue leading this area as the telescopes are constructed.

Science Minister George Freeman said: “It is no surprise that the UK’s outstanding scientists are playing such a vital role in shaping the future of this cutting-edge global observatory, backed by £15 million government funding.

“As well as providing the foundation for new galaxy-level discoveries, this award will help to guarantee future contracts for UK industry, secure skilled jobs and develop a highly-transferrable technology in the UK – channelling more money back into the UK economy.

“This reflects the incredible skill of our science community, who are working hand-in-hand with industry to ensure the UK continues to grow as a global science superpower.”

The SKAO headquarters is based at Jodrell Bank, near 91ֱ��, and its expansion was co-funded by the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), through STFC.

The UK government, through STFC, is the largest contributor to the SKAO and currently has a commitment to support 15% of the total cost of construction and initial operations from 2021 to 2030.

Professor Mark Thomson, Executive Chair of STFC and member of the SKAO Council, said: “The UK continues to play a leading role in the SKAO and the development of its telescopes.

“For any large scientific endeavour, the linchpin of its success lies in the infrastructure. Without the power to process and organise the vast amounts of information these telescopes will gather, we could not make the important discoveries.

 “With the skills and expertise of our researchers and colleagues in industry, the UK will deliver the computing brain and nervous system of the telescopes to enable the observations and unlock the science.”

Building the next generation of telescopes

The SKAO , which is expected to be completed by the end of the decade, with the telescopes anticipated to operate for over 50 years.

As one of the largest scientific endeavours in history, the SKAO brings together more than 500 engineers and 1,000 scientists in more than 20 countries.

The telescopes will be able to survey the sky much faster than existing radio telescopes, and so will require powerful computing to ingest and process in real time the expected data rate of 8 terabits of data per second and to support the regional processing centres managing more than 700 petabytes a year.  At these challenging scales, high performance computing and software design are a cornerstone of the project.

Specialised cutting-edge software is being designed to control and monitor the telescope operations, and to allow detailed calibration and processing the huge amounts scientific data.

Working with industry

As well as utilising the expertise from UK’s research and academia, software development also relies on vital input from industry partners.

STFC’s Conrad Graham, UK project manager, said: “Involvement with the SKA project brings significant benefits for the UK, not just in terms of direct economic returns on investment, but also via innovation and technological spin offs, driven by the requirements of the project.

“The award of new contracts will provide opportunities for UK industry to engage with the project across all areas of SKA software design.

 “As a result of the UK’s participation and the SKAO’s policy of fair work return, the UK is leading on seven high-value construction contracts, which will see the creation of significant new opportunities for UK industry.”

The exoplanet, K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, is almost identical to Jupiter in terms of its mass and its distance from its sun was discovered using data obtained in 2016 by NASA's Kepler space telescope. The exoplanetary system is twice as distant as any seen previously by Kepler, which found over 2,700 confirmed planets before ceasing operations in 2018.

The system was found using gravitational microlensing, a prediction of Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and is the first planet to be discovered from space in this way. The study has been submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and has been made available as a preprint on .

PhD student, David Specht from The University of Manchester is the lead author on the new research. To find an exoplanet using the microlensing effect the team searched through Kepler data collected between April and July 2016 when it regularly monitored millions of stars close to the centre of the Galaxy. The aim was to look for evidence of an exoplanet and its host star temporarily bending and magnifying the light from a background star as it passes by the line of sight.

"To see the effect at all requires almost perfect alignment between the foreground planetary system and a background star", said Dr Eamonn Kerins, Principal Investigator for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) grant that funded the work. Dr Kerins adds: "The chance that a background star is affected this way by a planet is tens to hundreds of millions to one against.  But there are hundreds of millions of stars towards the centre of our Galaxy. So Kepler just sat and watched them for three months."

Following the development of specialised analysis methods, candidate signals were finally uncovered last year using a new search algorithm presented in a study led by Dr Iain McDonald, at the time an STFC-funded postdoctoral researcher, working with Dr Kerins. Among five new candidate microlensing signals uncovered in that analysis one showed clear indications of an anomaly consistent with the presence of an orbiting exoplanet.

Five international ground-based surveys also looked at the same area of sky at the same time as Kepler.  At a distance of around 135 million km from Earth, Kepler saw the anomaly slightly earlier, and for longer, than the teams observing from Earth. The new study exhaustively models the combined datasets showing, conclusively, that the signal is caused by a distant exoplanet.

"The difference in vantage point between Kepler and observers here on Earth allowed us to triangulate where along our sight line the planetary system is located", says Dr Kerins. 

"Kepler was also able to observe uninterrupted by weather or daylight, allowing us to determine precisely the mass of the exoplanet and its orbital distance from its host star. It is basically Jupiter's identical twin in terms of its mass and its position from its Sun, which is about 60% of the mass of our own Sun."

Later this decade NASA will launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope. Roman will find potentially thousands of distant planets using the microlensing method.  The European Space Agency's Euclid mission, due to launch next year, could also undertake a microlensing exoplanet search as an additional science activity.

Dr Kerins is Deputy Lead for the ESA Euclid Exoplanet Science Working Group. "Kepler was never designed to find planets using microlensing so, in many ways, it's amazing that it has done so. Roman and Euclid, on the other hand, will be optimised for this kind of work. They will be able to complete the planet census started by Kepler.” he said.

“We'll learn how typical the architecture of our own solar system is. The data will also allow us to test our ideas of how planets form. This is the start of a new exciting chapter in our search for other worlds."

The stunning new building is at the heart of a £21.5m project, supported by DCMS and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which aims to open up the inspirational history of the UK’s newest UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The concept for the new building was an original idea developed by Professors Teresa Anderson and Tim O’Brien, who have passionately spearheaded the project since its inception.

Professor Anderson, Director, Jodrell Bank Centre for Engagement, said: "After years of planning, we are thrilled to finally be able to announce the opening of First Light. This moment will mark a whole new chapter for Jodrell Bank and we're looking forward to welcoming our first visitors through the doors and in to this beautiful new space."

The building itself was designed by the award-winning architects HASSELL Studio and takes the form of a grass-topped 76m-diameter dome, which cleverly mirrors the shape and scale of the landmark Lovell Telescope.

Inside the new Pavilion, visitors will be able to engage with the site’s rich heritage in a brand new permanent exhibition. Created by leading exhibition designers Casson Mann, the First Light Exhibition will bring to life the Jodrell Bank story, which dates back to 1945 and the birth of a whole new science: the exploration of the Universe using radio waves instead of visible light.

Professor O'Brien, Associate Director, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, explains: "That transformational development in this quiet corner of Cheshire completely opened up humanity's understanding of the universe and allowed us to discover previously undreamt of things such as pulsars, quasars, and even the fading glow of the Big Bang."

Exhibition audiences will be able to see a range of fascinating archive materials brought together for the first time, including audio, film, diaries, letters, plans, notebooks and photographs. Highlights include a number of personal items belonging to Jodrell Bank’s founder Sir Bernard Lovell.

Meanwhile, visitors will also be able to experience vivid planetarium-style shows in a custom-built auditorium, complete with a curved projection screen and an impressive nine digital projectors. A new temporary exhibition gallery with an opening show all about the realisation of the First Light project will also feature in the new building.

A 130-cover café, complete with a terrace overlooking the Jodrell Bank Arboretum and a fresh menu using seasonal and sustainable produce, is yet another part of the development. Plus, a new guided tour that takes visitors to previously inaccessible parts of the Jodrell Bank site will also be launched later in the year.

A series of preview and pilot activities for First Light begins this month, with the public opening set to take place on 4 June 2022. The launch will be complimented by a celebratory summer-long season of community-engagement activity, public events, and a new formal education programme.

Eilish McGuinness, CEO of The National Lottery Heritage Fund said:  “The National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £12.5 million to the First Light Project so that the site’s powerful human stories of curiosity, exploration and discovery could be shared with the public. The stunning new building, its exciting exhibition, and an incredibly diverse and inclusive engagement programme, will all have a fantastic impact, delighting and inspiring every visitor.”

First Light at Jodrell Bank is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the UK Government (DCMS), The University of Manchester, and a number of kind donors, including the Wolfson, Garfield Weston, Denise Coates, and Stavros Niarchos foundations.

Using the Very Large Array (VLA) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), the scientific group has studied the binary star SVS 13, still in its embryonic phase. This work has provided the best description available so far on a binary system in formation.

Models of planet formation suggest that planets form by the slow aggregation of ice and dust particles in protoplanetary disks around forming stars. Usually these models consider only single stars, such as the Sun. However, most stars form binary systems, in which two stars rotate around a common centre.  Very little is yet known about how planets are born around these important twin star systems, in which the gravitational interaction between the two stars plays an essential role. 

"Our results have revealed that each star has a disk of gas and dust around it and that, in addition, a larger disk is forming around both stars," says Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez, a researcher at the IAA-CSIC and the UK ALMA Regional Centre (UK-ARC) at The University of Manchester, who leads the work.

“This outer disk shows a spiral structure that is feeding matter into the individual disks, and in all of them planetary systems could form in the future. This is clear evidence for the presence of disks around both stars and the existence of a common disk in a binary system.”

The binary system SVS 13, consisting of two stellar embryos with a total mass similar to that of the Sun, is relatively close to us, about 980 light-years away in the Perseus molecular cloud allowing its detailed study. The two stars in the system are very close to each other, with a distance of only about ninety times that between the Earth and the Sun.

The work has made it possible to study the composition of gas, dust and ionized matter in the system. In addition, nearly thirty different molecules have been identified around both protostars, including thirteen complex organic molecules precursors of life (seven of them detected for the first time in this system). "This means that when planets begin to form around these two suns, the building blocks of life will be there," says Ana Karla Díaz-Rodríguez (IAA-CSIC / UK-ARC).

The scientific team has used the observations of SVS 13 obtained by the VLA over thirty years, together with new data from ALMA, and has followed the motion of both stars over this period, which has allowed their orbit to be traced, as well as the geometry and orientation of the system, along with many fundamental parameters, such as the mass of the protostars, the mass of the disks, and their temperature. Gary Fuller of The University of Manchester, a collaborator on the project, says: “This work shows how careful, systematic studies of young stars can provide a remarkably detailed view of their structure and properties.“

"At the IAA we began studying this system twenty-five years ago. We were surprised when we discovered that SVS 13 was a radio binary, because only one star is seen in the optical. Normally, stellar embryos are detected in radio, but they only become visible at the end of the gestation process. It was very strange to discover a pair of twin stars where one of them seemed to have evolved much faster than the other. We designed several experiments to get more details and to find out if in such a case either of the stars could form planets. Now we have seen that both stars are very young, and that both can form planets," says Guillem Anglada, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) who is coordinating the studies of SVS 13.

SVS 13 has generated much debate in the scientific literature, as some studies consider it to be extremely young and others consider it to be in a later stage. This new study, probably the most complete study of a binary star system in formation, not only sheds light on the nature of the two protostars and their environment, but also provides crucial parameters for testing numerical simulations of the early stages of binary and multiple system formation.

 

An epic deep space cosmic ballet of two giant black holes orbiting one another every two years has been observed for the first time by an international team of astronomers. Locked in an epic cosmic waltz 9 billion light-years away the two supermassive black holes appear to be orbiting around each other every two years.

The two massive bodies are each hundreds of millions of times the mass of our sun and separated by a distance of roughly fifty times that between our sun and Pluto. When the pair merge in roughly 10,000 years, the titanic collision is expected to shake space and time itself, sending gravitational waves across the universe.

The astounding new research was published in The Journal of Astrophysical Letters today. The evidence, collected over decades, shows the cosmic event taking place within a fiercely energetic object known as a quasar. Quasars are active cores of galaxies in which a supermassive black hole is siphoning material from a disk encircling it. In some quasars, the supermassive black hole creates a jet that shoots out at near the speed of light. The quasar observed in the new study, PKS 2131-021, belongs to a subclass of quasars called blazars in which the jet is pointing towards the Earth. Astronomers already knew that quasars could possess two orbiting supermassive black holes, but finding direct evidence for this has proved difficult.

Professor Keith Grainge from The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank said: "This is a mind boggling story that has been 45 years in the making. Nine billion light years away there two monster black holes, each many millions of times more massive than our Sun, orbiting round each other. We can see this with radio telescopes because one of the black holes is emitting a radio jet towards us and we see it brightening and fading as they rotate one another."

The researchers argue that PKS 2131-021 is now the second known candidate for a pair of supermassive black holes caught in the act of merging. The first candidate pair, within a quasar called OJ 287, orbit each other at greater distances, circling every 9 years versus the two years it takes for the PKS 2131-021 pair to complete an orbit.

The tell-tale evidence came from radio observations of PKS 2131-021 that span 45 years. According to the study, a powerful jet emanating from one of the two black holes within PKS 2131-021 is shifting back and forth due to the pair's orbital motion. This causes periodic changes in the quasar's radio-light brightness.

Professor Grainge has been involved in this work since 2006 when he helped with re-commissioning the OVRO-40m telescope, which has provided much of the radio data in the paper. “Since then I have been involved with a programme of using the OVRO-40m to monitor the radio flux of ~1500 blazar candidates (a blazar is a particular type of active galactic nucleus, AGN) every 3 or so days. One of these sources turned out to have this interesting periodic variability which makes it a good candidate for a binary supermassive black hole system.” said Grainge.

"When we realised that the peaks and troughs of the light curve detected from recent times matched the peaks and troughs observed between 1975 and 1983, we knew something very special was going on," says Sandra O'Neill, lead author of the new study and an undergraduate student at Caltech.

Professor Tony Readhead from Caltech, who leads the collaboration, compares the system of the jet moving back and forth to a ticking clock, where each cycle, or period, of the sine wave corresponds to the two-year orbit of the black holes (the observed cycle is actually five years due to light being stretched by the expansion of the universe). "The clock kept ticking," he says, "The stability of the period over this 20-year gap strongly suggests that this blazar harbours not one supermassive black hole, but two supermassive black holes orbiting each other."

Ripples in Space and Time

Most, if not all, galaxies possess monstrous black holes at their cores, including our own Milky Way galaxy. When galaxies merge, their black holes "sink" to the middle of the newly formed galaxy and eventually join together to form an even more massive black hole. As the black holes spiral toward each other, they increasingly disturb the fabric of space and time, sending out gravitational waves, which were first predicted by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago.

The National Science Foundation's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), which is managed jointly by Caltech and MIT, detects gravitational waves from pairs of black holes up to dozens of times the mass of our sun. However, the supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies have masses that are millions to billions of times that of our sun, and give off lower frequencies of gravitational waves than what LIGO detects.

In the future, pulsar timing arrays—which consist of an array of pulsing, dead stars precisely monitored by radio telescopes—should be able to detect the gravitational waves from supermassive black holes of this heft (the upcoming LISA mission would detect merging black holes from a thousand to ten million times the mass of the sun). So far, no gravitational waves have been registered from any of these heavier sources but PKS 2131-021 provides the most promising target yet.

The international team including scientists from; the Max Planck Insitute, The University of British Columbia and The University of East Anglia looked to the stars - a pair of extreme stars called pulsars to be precise – through seven radio telescopes across the globe.

And they used them to challenge Einstein’s most famous theory with some of the most rigorous tests yet.

The study, published today in the journal , reveals new relativistic effects that, although expected, have now been observed for the first time.

Emeritus Professor at The University of Manchester Andrew Lyne, said: "The discovery of the double pulsar system was made as part of a survey co-led from The University of Manchester and presented us with the only known instance of two cosmic clocks which allow precise measurement of the structure and evolution of an intense gravitational field.

“The Lovell Telescope at the has been monitoring it every couple of weeks since then. This long baseline of high quality and frequent observations provided an excellent data set to be combined with those from observatories around the world.”

Led by Professor Michael Kramer from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany and also affiliated with The University of Manchester, the international team of researchers from ten countries, put Einstein’s theory to the most rigorous tests yet.

The double pulsar consists of two pulsars which orbit each other in just 147 minutes with velocities of about 1 million km/h. One pulsar is spinning very fast, about 44 times a second. The companion is young and has a rotation period of 2.8 seconds. It is their motion around each other which can be used as a near perfect gravity laboratory.

Seven sensitive radio telescopes were used to observe this double pulsar – in Australia, the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands and in the UK (the Lovell Radio Telescope).

Professor Kramer said: “We studied a system of compact stars that is an unrivalled laboratory to test gravity theories in the presence of very strong gravitational fields.

“To our delight we were able to test a cornerstone of Einstein’s theory, the energy carried by gravitational waves, with a precision that is 25 times better than with the Nobel-Prize winning Hulse-Taylor pulsar, and 1000 times better than currently possible with gravitational wave detectors.”

He explained that the observations are not only in agreement with the theory, “but we were also able to see effects that could not be studied before''.

Prof Ingrid Stairs from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, said: “We follow the propagation of radio photons emitted from a cosmic lighthouse, a pulsar, and track their motion in the strong gravitational field of a companion pulsar.

“We see for the first time how the light is not only delayed due to a strong curvature of spacetime around the companion, but also that the light is deflected by a small angle of 0.04 degrees that we can detect. Never before has such an experiment been conducted at such a high spacetime curvature.”

Prof Dick 91ֱ�� from Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, said: “Such fast orbital motion of compact objects like these - they are about 30 per cent more massive than the Sun but only about 24 km across - allows us to test many different predictions of general relativity - seven in total!

“Apart from gravitational waves and light propagation, our precision allows us also to measure the effect of “time dilation” that makes clocks run slower in gravitational fields.

“We even need to take Einstein's famous equation E = mc² into account when considering the effect of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the fast-spinning pulsar on the orbital motion.

“This radiation corresponds to a mass loss of 8 million tonnes per second! While this seems a lot, it is only a tiny fraction - 3 parts in a thousand billion billion(!) - of the mass of the pulsar per second.”

The researchers also measured - with a precision of 1 part in a million(!) - that the orbit changes its orientation, a relativistic effect also well known from the orbit of Mercury, but here 140,000 times stronger.

They realised that at this level of precision they also need to consider the impact of the pulsar’s rotation on the surrounding spacetime, which is “dragged along” with the spinning pulsar.

Dr Norbert Wex from the MPIfR, another main author of the study, said: “Physicists call this the Lense-Thirring effect or frame-dragging. In our experiment it means that we need to consider the internal structure of a pulsar as a neutron star.

“Hence, our measurements allow us for the first time to use the precision tracking of the rotations of the neutron star, a technique that we call pulsar timing to provide constraints on the extension of a neutron star.”

The technique of pulsar timing was combined with careful interferometric measurements of the system to determine its distance with high resolution imaging, resulting in a value of 2400 light years with only 8 per cent error margin.

Team member Prof Adam Deller, from Swinburne University in Australia and responsible for this part of the experiment, said: “It is the combination of different complementary observing techniques that adds to the extreme value of the experiment. In the past similar studies were often hampered by the limited knowledge of the distance of such systems.”

This is not the case here, where in addition to pulsar timing and interferometry also the information gained from effects due to the interstellar medium were carefully taken into account.

Prof Bill Coles from the University of California San Diego agrees: “We gathered all possible information on the system and we derived a perfectly consistent picture, involving physics from many different areas, such as nuclear physics, gravity, interstellar medium, plasma physics and more. This is quite extraordinary.”

Paulo Freire, also from MPIfR, said: “Our results are nicely complementary to other experimental studies which test gravity in other conditions or see different effects, like gravitational wave detectors or the Event Horizon Telescope.

“They also complement other pulsar experiments, like our timing experiment with the pulsar in a stellar triple system, which has provided an independent and superb test of the universality of free fall.”

Prof Kramer added: “We have reached a level of precision that is unprecedented. Future experiments with even bigger telescopes can and will go still further.

“Our work has shown the way such experiments need to be conducted and which subtle effects now need to be taken into account. And, maybe, we will find a deviation from general relativity one day.”

“Strong-field Gravity Tests with the Double Pulsar” is published in Physical Review X on December 13, 2021.

The international research team has today published in, , a detailed analysis of a candidate signal for the since-long sought gravitational wave background (GWB) due to in-spiralling supermassive black-hole binaries. Although a detection cannot be claimed yet, this represents another significant step in the effort to finally unveil GWs at very low frequencies, of order one billionth of a Hertz.

In fact, the candidate signal has emerged from an unprecedented detailed analysis and using two independent methodologies. Moreover, the signal shares strong similarities with those found from the analyses of other teams.

Dr Michael Keith of The University of Manchester, said: “For the last 20 years or so we have been trying to detect the gravitational waves produced by super-massive black holes in the centres of distant galaxies. Although these waves are very tiny - nanosecond fluctuations over tens of years, the detection of these waves has implications for the formation of all galaxies, including our own Milky Way.

“So far nobody has detected these waves, but we have found an intriguing signal in the data that matches some, but not all, of the properties of the gravitational wave signal we are looking for. The paper presents the data and some of the extensive range of tests we have done to support the hypothesis that the observed signal is from ultra-low frequency gravitational waves passing over the earth.”

The results were made possible thanks to the data collected over 24 years with five large-aperture radio telescopes in Europe. They include; the world-renowned Lovell Telescope at The University of Manchester’s , MPIfR’s 100-m Radio Telescope near Effelsberg in Germany, the 94-m Nançay Decimetric Radio Telescope in France, the 64-m Sardinia Radio Telescope at Pranu Sanguni, Italy and the 16 antennas of the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope in the Netherlands. In the observing mode of the Large European Array for Pulsars (LEAP), the EPTA telescopes are tied together to synthesize a fully steerable 200-m dish to greatly enhance the sensitivity of the EPTA towards gravitational waves.

Radiation beams from the pulsars’ magnetic poles circle around their rotational axes, and we observe them as pulses when they pass our line of sight, like the light of a distant lighthouse. Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) are networks of very stably rotating pulsars, used as galactic-scale GW detectors. In particular, they are sensitive to very low frequency GWs in the billionth-of-a-Hertz regime. This will extend the GW observing window from the high frequencies (hundreds of Hertz) currently observed by the ground-based detectors LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA.

While those detectors probe short lasting collisions of stellar-mass black holes and neutron stars, PTAs can probe GWs such as those emitted by systems of slowly in-spiraling supermassive black-hole binaries hosted at the centres of galaxies. The addition of the GWs released from a cosmic population of these binaries forms a GWB.

The small fluctuations in the arrival times of the pulsars’ radio signal at Earth can be measured, caused by the spacetime deformation due to a passing-by very low frequency gravitational waves. In practice, these deformations manifest as sources of a very low frequency noise in the series of the observed times of arrival of the pulses, a noise which is shared by all the pulsars of a pulsar timing array.

However, the amplitude of this noise is incredibly tiny (estimated to be tens to a couple hundreds of a billionth of a second) and in principle many other effects could impart that to any given pulsar in the PTA.

To validate the results, multiple independent codes with different statistical frameworks were then used to mitigate alternate sources of noise and search for the GWB. Importantly, two independent end-to-end procedures were used in the analysis for cross-consistency. Additionally, three independent methods were used to account for possible systematics in the Solar-system planetary parameters used in the models predicting the pulse arrival times, a prime candidate for false-positive GW signals.

The EPTA analysis with both procedures found a clear candidate signal for a GWB and its spectral properties (i.e. how the amplitude of the observed noise varies with its frequency) remain within theoretical expectations for the noise attributable to a GWB.

Dr. Nicolas Caballero, researcher at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Beijing and co-lead author explains: “The EPTA first found indications for this signal in their previously published data set in 2015, but as the results had larger statistical uncertainties, they were only strictly discussed as upper limits. Our new data now clearly confirm the presence of this signal, making it a candidate for a GWB".

The paper, Common-red-signal analysis with 24-yr high-precision timing of the European Pulsar Timing Array: inferences in the stochastic gravitational-wave background search, is published in .

The new research, published in the journal , determined the basaltic volcanic rocks, collected as part of China’s Chang’e-5 Moon landing in December 2020, were two billion years old – one billion years younger than any other dated basaltic lava from the Moon. The findings are significant as they present a new mystery to solve on how such a small rocky planetary body could retain enough heat to enable melting of its interior, and volcanic eruptions at its surface, two and a half billion years after it formed.

The lead group at the Beijing SHRIMP Center in China sorted through allocated material to pick out ~2 mm fragments of rocky material, which they then analysed using a range of laboratory analytical techniques.

Co-lead international author Professor Alexander Nemchin, from Curtin University’s Space Science and Technology Centre in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, says “This was a truly international effort when having people in different time zones gave us ability to work on the project 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Some of us on the team still remember excitement of working with the samples nobody ever seen before from the Apollo era, others experienced this for the first time”.

Dr Romain Tartese, a Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw and STFC Ernest Rutherford Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: “Continuous laboratory developments over the past decade, initially developed for analysis of lunar samples returned half a century ago by the Apollo missions, have allowed colleagues in China to extract crucial age information from these millimetre-sized particles scooped on the Moon’s surface. These young eruption ages are really exciting as it is a complete mystery how the interior of the Moon stayed hot enough to generate such young lava flows only 2 billion years ago.”

Dr Joshua Snape, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: “Samples like this allow us to not only understand the history of the Moon, but to also relate the age of the geological unit they were collected from to the number and size of impact craters that scar its surface. Combining these records helps us to calibrate the rates of impact cratering across the wider Solar System, helping us understand the geological records of other planetary bodies”

Prof Katherine Joy, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: “It was a privilege to work on an international science team to investigate these newly collected Moon rocks as these samples are hugely significant within the context of renewed lunar exploration efforts. Whilst exciting new findings are coming out of the Chang’e 5 material, we are also looking forward to the next Chang’e 6 robotic sample return mission, which will likely take place later this year or early next year, returning the first samples from the lunar farside.”

The research was carried out in collaboration with experts from the International Lunar and Planetary Research Center of China, The Beijing SHRIMP Center, The Australian National University, Washington University in St Louis, Notre Dame University, Brown University, and the University of Colorado, in the United States of America, The University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, and the Swedish Museum of Natural History.

The paper, Age and composition of the youngest basalts on the Moon returned by the Chang’e-5 mission, is published in .

(September 15, 2021) says that a faint, fast expanding cloud (or nebula), called Pa30, surrounding one of the hottest stars in the Milky Way, known as Parker’s Star, fits the profile, location and age of the historic supernova.

There have only been five bright supernovae in the Milky Way in the last millennium (starting in 1006). Of these, the Chinese supernova, which is also known as the ‘Chinese Guest Star’ of 1181AD has remained a mystery. It was originally seen and documented by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in the 12^th century who said it was as bright as the planet Saturn and remained visible for six months. They also recorded an approximate location in the sky of the sighting, but no confirmed remnant of the explosion has even been identified by modern astronomers. The other four supernovae are all now well known to modern day science and include the famous Crab nebula.

The source of this 12^th century explosion remained a mystery until this latest discovery made by a team of international astronomers from Hong Kong, the UK, Spain, Hungary and France, including Professor Albert Zijlstra from The University of Manchester. In the new paper, the astronomers found that the Pa 30 nebula is expanding at an extreme velocity of more than 1,100 km per second (at this speed, traveling from the Earth to the Moon would take only 5 minutes). They use this velocity to derive an age at around 1,000 years, which would coincide with the events of 1181AD.

Prof Zijlstra (Professor in Astrophysics at the University of Manchester) explains: “The historical reports place the guest star between two Chinese constellations, Chuanshe and Huagai. Parker’s Star fits the position well. That means both the age and location fit with the events of 1181.”

Pa 30 and Parker's Star have previously been proposed as the result of a merger of two White Dwarfs. Such events are thought to lead to a rare and relatively faint type of supernova, called a ‘Type Iax supernova’.

Prof Zijlstra added: “Only around 10% of supernovae are of this type and they are not well understood. The fact that SN1181 was faint but faded very slowly fits this type. It is the only such event where we can study both the remnant nebula and the merged star, and also have a description of the explosion itself.”

The merging of remnant stars, white dwarfs and neutron stars, give rise to extreme nuclear reactions and form heavy, highly neutron-rich elements such as gold and platinum. Prof. Zijlstra said: “Combining all this information such as the age, location, event brightness and historically recorded 185-day duration, indicates that Parker’s star and Pa30 are the counterparts of SN 1181. This is the only Type Iax supernova where detailed studies of the remnant star and nebula are possible. It is nice to be able to solve both a historical and an astronomical mystery.”

Paper: The Remnant and Origin of the Historical Supernova 1181 AD - Andreas Ritter^1,2, Quentin A. Parker^1,2, Foteini Lykou^1,2,3, Albert A. Zijlstra^2,4, Martín A. Guerrero⁵, and Pascal Le D⁶ Published 2021 September 15 • © 2021. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. , ,  - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac2253 

The results include four new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth, published today in . The study, led by Dr Iain McDonald of The University of Manchester, UK, (now based at the , UK) used data obtained in 2016 during the K2 mission phase of NASA’s .

During this two-month campaign, Kepler monitored a crowded field of millions of stars near the centre of our Galaxy every 30 minutes in order to find rare events.

The study team found 27 short-duration candidate microlensing signals that varied over timescales of between an hour and 10 days. Many of these had been previously seen in data obtained simultaneously from the ground. However, the four shortest events are new discoveries that are consistent with planets of similar masses to Earth.

These new events do not show an accompanying longer signal that might be expected from a host star, suggesting that these new events may be free-floating planets. Such planets may perhaps have originally formed around a host star before being ejected by the gravitational tug of other, heavier planets in the system.

Predicted by Albert Einstein 85 years ago as a consequence of his , microlensing describes how the light from a background star can be temporarily magnified by the presence of other stars in the foreground. This produces a short burst in brightness that can last from hours to a few days. Roughly one out of every million stars in our is visibly affected by microlensing at any given time, but only a few percent of these are expected to be caused by planets.

Kepler was not designed to find planets using microlensing, nor to study the extremely dense star fields of the inner Galaxy. This meant that new data reduction techniques had to be developed to look for signals within the Kepler dataset.

Dr McDonald said: “These signals are extremely difficult to find. Our observations pointed an elderly, ailing telescope with blurred vision at one the most densely crowded parts of the sky, where there are already thousands of bright stars that vary in brightness, and thousands of asteroids that skim across our field. From that cacophony, we try to extract tiny, characteristic brightenings caused by planets, and we only have one chance to see a signal before it’s gone. It’s about as easy as looking for the single blink of a firefly in the middle of a motorway, using only a handheld phone.”

Confirming the existence and nature of free-floating planets will be a major focus for upcoming missions such as the , and possibly the mission, both of which will be optimised to look for microlensing signals.

Co-author Eamonn Kerins of The University of Manchester said: "Kepler has achieved what it was never designed to do, in providing further tentative evidence for the existence of a population of Earth-mass, free-floating planets. Now it passes the baton on to Roman that will be designed to find such signals, signals so elusive that Einstein himself thought that they were unlikely ever to be observed. I am very excited that the upcoming ESA Euclid mission could also join this effort as an additional science activity to its main mission."

The project is a €5.7 million project led by The University of Manchester. It aims to revolutionise Earth observation satellites, developing technologies to enable them to operate in very low Earth orbits, under 450km altitude, with the aim of making the satellites smaller, lighter & more economical. Orbiting much closer to the Earth helps them to avoid space debris and improves the quality of images they can send back.

The University’s Satellite for Orbital Aerodynamics Research (SOAR) is a 3U CubeSat and will be launched on SpaceX’s CRS-22 mission on 3 June 2021 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida to the International Space Station from where it will be deployed into orbit.

Whilst in orbit the satellite will be controlled from a ground station based on the University campus where experiments will be conducted and analysed. Data received from the satellite will be delivered back to scientists who will study the interactions between the residual atmosphere in these low orbits and new materials developed at the University that could reduce drag and increase aerodynamic performance.

Dr Peter Roberts, the scientific coordinator for DISCOVERER said: “The satellite represents the culmination of a huge amount of technology development over many years. We’re breaking new ground with a satellite designed specifically to explore aerodynamic effects in very low Earth orbits, whilst simultaneously measuring atmospheric parameters such as density and composition.”

The satellite features a set of fins that are coated with four different materials for testing and can be individually rotated to different angles. The fins will be folded and stowed against the spacecraft body for launch and are deployed once the satellite is in orbit enabling the interaction of the different test materials with the residual atmosphere to be investigated.

These steerable fins will also be used as control surfaces to demonstrate novel aerodynamic control manoeuvres in orbit.

The ISS deployment opportunity is being made available by  through its Space Act Agreement with the ISS National Lab. Collaborators for the satellite include the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London who provide a mass spectrometer for in-situ characterisation of the atmospheric conditions, and GOMSpace who led on the satellite bus design, integration and testing.

“The satellite launch is a key milestone for DISCOVERER, paving the way for the regular use of very low orbits for commercial missions”, according to Dr Roberts.

The DISCOVERER project is developing technologies to enable commercially-viable sustained-operation of satellites in very low Earth orbits for communications and remote sensing applications. Operating closer to the surface of the Earth significantly reduces latency for communications applications and improves link budgets, whilst remote sensing also benefits from improved link budgets, the ability to have higher resolution or smaller instruments, all of which provide cost benefits.

In addition, all applications benefit from increased launch mass to lower altitudes, whilst end-of-life removal is ensured due to the increased atmospheric drag. However, this drag must also be minimised and compensated for. The 91ֱ�� team have developed several different advanced materials that will also be tested in a unique rarefied flow wind tunnel that mimics the atmospheric composition and speed the satellite will experience at low orbit altitudes. The in-orbit phase of testing on SOAR is intended to validate the performance of these materials, enabling the much sought-after development of new, smaller, low orbit satellites.

The DISCOVERER project is also developing atmosphere breathing electric propulsion prototypes that aim to utilise the residual atmosphere in low orbits as a propellant. This has the potential to keep the satellites in orbit indefinitely despite the drag acting upon them. However, it also means that the satellites will re-enter quickly when they reach the end of their mission avoiding the space debris problems experienced at higher altitudes.

All these technological developments, materials research, aerodynamic control and propulsion systems, are being worked into new engineering and business models identifying what future very low Earth orbit remote sensing satellites would look like and how they would operate. The project is also mapping out the path for future exploitation of the developed concepts.

The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 737183. This publication reflects only the author’s views and the European Commission is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

is one of The University of Manchester’s - examples of pioneering discoveries, interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-sector partnerships that are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing the planet. #ResearchBeacons

Millisecond pulsars are neutron stars, the most compact star known, that spin up to 700 times per second. This is the first pulsar discovery using the MeerKAT antennas and it comes from the synergic work of two international collaborations, and , with the findings detailed in a paper published today.

Millisecond pulsars are extremely compact stars mainly made up of neutrons, and are amongst the most extreme objects in the universe: they pack hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Earth in a sphere with a diameter of about 24 km; and spin at a rate of hundreds of rotations per second. They emit a beam of radio waves that are detected by the observer at every rotation, like a lighthouse. The formation of these objects is highly enhanced in the star-rich environments at the centres of globular clusters.

“It is really exciting to see the potential for finding a large number of new millisecond pulsars in Globular Clusters using the excellent MeerKAT telescope.” says Professor Ben Stappers, from The University of Manchester and co-PI of the TRAPUM project. “It is also a preview of what will be possible with the telescope for which MeerKAT is one of the precursors.”

Lead author, Alessandro Ridolfi, a post-doctoral research fellow at INAF and MPIfR said: “We directed the MeerKAT antennas toward 9 globular clusters, and we discovered new pulsars in 6 of them!” Five of these new pulsars orbit around another star, and one of these, named PSR J1823-3021G, is particularly interesting: “Because of its highly elliptical orbit, and massive companion, this system is likely the result of an exchange of partners: following a 'close encounter': the original partner was expelled and replaced by a new companion star", continues Ridolfi.

Tasha Gautam, doctoral researcher at the MPIfR in Bonn and co-author of the paper, explains: “This particular pulsar could have a high mass, more than 2 times the mass of the Sun, or it could be the first confirmed system formed by a millisecond pulsar and a neutron star. If confirmed by current additional observations, this would make this millisecond pulsar a formidable laboratory for studying fundamental physics“.

The 8 new pulsars are just the tip of the iceberg: the observations that led to their discovery used only about 40 of the MeerKAT 64 antennas and focused only on the central regions of the globular clusters. 

The TRAPUM collaboration (the TRAnsients and PUlsars with MeerKAT) is one of several Large Survey Proposals (LSP) approved to use the MeerKAT telescope. It is co-led by Professor Stappers from The University of Manchester and and Professor Kramer (MPIfR/UoM). TRAPUM will search the sky for pulsars and transients using the extremely high sensitivity of MeerKAT. One of the places they will search are Globular Clusters. This result was obtained in collaboration with MeerTIME, another MeerKAT LSP, and used their infrastructure for capturing the data.

This work also served as a testbed for the TRAPUM collaboration to better plan the fully-fledged globular cluster pulsar survey, which is currently underway and which makes use of all the current 64 dishes (thus further gaining in sensitivity). The survey will broaden the search to many more globular clusters, and will also survey their outer regions.

Operated by SARAO, MeerKAT is the largest radio telescope in the Southern hemisphere and one of two SKA Observatory precursor instruments in South Africa. Located in the Karoo desert, the radio telescope will soon be expanded with an additional 20 dishes, bringing the total number of antennas up to 84 and becoming “MeerKAT+”. This will later be gradually integrated into the first phase of the SKAO project, whose construction will soon begin and will continue until 2027. The first scientific observations of MeerKAT+ could begin as early as 2023, during the testing phases of the telescope.

TRAPUM is one of the Large Survey Proposals running on MeerKAT and is an international collaboration, led by The University of Manchester and the MPIfR, and includes institutions such as INAF, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO).

MeerTIME is also a Large Survey Proposal running on MeerKAT, led by the Swinburne University of Technology, and integrating several Australian institutions as well as INAF, University of Manchester, MPIfR, NRAO and SARAO.

Almost 300g of a very rare meteorite, known as a carbonaceous chondrite, survived its fiery passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and landed on a driveway in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe. Other pieces of this exceptional meteorite have now been recovered in the local area. Specialised cameras across the country were able to recreate the flight path, allowing scientists to determine exactly where in the solar system it came from, and predict where it fell. The original space rock was travelling at nearly 14km per second before hitting the Earth’s atmosphere.

The meteorite was retrieved in such a good condition, so quickly after its fall, that it is comparable to the samples returned from space missions, both in quality and quantity.

Dr Ashley King, UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at the , was among the first on the scene when the meteorite was discovered on Wednesday and has been advising on the handling and care of the meteorite since. He says: “Nearly all meteorites come to us from asteroids, the leftover building blocks of the solar system that can tell us how planets like the Earth formed. The opportunity to be one of the first people to see and study a meteorite that was recovered almost immediately after falling is a dream come true!”

Dr Katherine Joy, a Royal Society University Research Fellow at The University of Manchester said: “This is a hugely exciting scientific event as it is the first time in 30 years that a meteorite sample has fallen and been recovered in the UK. Normally we have to send spacecraft to collect bits of other worlds, but this time one has fallen right into our laps! We look forward to using our laboratories in 91ֱ�� and working with our colleagues to investigate how the newly recovered UK meteorite fall can provide insights to how planets in the early Solar System were formed.”

Dr Richard Greenwood, Research Fellow in Planetary Sciences at the Open University was the first scientist to identify and advise on the meteorite. Dr Greenwood says: "I was in shock when I saw it and immediately knew it was a rare meteorite and a totally unique event. It’s emotional being the first one to confirm to the people standing in front of you that the thud they heard on their driveway overnight is in fact the real thing."

Once the meteorite was identified as genuine, plans were made for it to be safely moved to the Natural History Museum where it will be properly cared for until it begins an official process of classification to establish its validity and scientific significance.

A team of specialist scientists from across the UK have been successfully searching the rest of the predicted fall area for more fragments including colleagues from; The University of Glasgow, The University of Manchester, The Open University, The University of Plymouth, and Imperial College London.

There are approximately 65 thousand known meteorites on Earth. Only 1206 have been witnessed to fall and of these only 51 are carbonaceous chondrites. This is the first known carbonaceous chondrite to have been found in the UK, and the first meteorite recovered in the UK in 30 years. The last meteorite that was discovered in the UK was the Glatton meteorite that landed in a residential garden in 1991.

A victory for UK citizen science, the fireball was seen by thousands of eyewitnesses across the UK and northern Europe, many of whom reported it to the , and was captured on many fireball cameras and home surveillance cameras when it fell to Earth at 21:54 on Sunday 28 February.

Meteorites are incredibly old – their age of about 4567 million years is much older than any rock from the Earth. Almost all these “space rocks” have been blasted off asteroids, and travel for many thousands of years through space before being captured – usually by the Sun, but occasionally by Earth. They travel through the atmosphere, sometimes – like the one that fell in Gloucestershire – producing a bright fireball before landing on Earth. Over 1000 meteorites the size of a football are believed to fall to Earth every year, however it is very rare for any of them to be seen to fall and recovered.

Carbonaceous chondrites, like the one just discovered, are made of a mixture of minerals and organic compounds – including amino acids. They are the most primitive and pristine materials of the solar system and can provide unique information on where water and the building blocks of life were formed and what planets are made from - some of the biggest questions asked by the scientific community.

The team believe that more fragments may yet be discovered. This fragile meteorite may be found as black stones, or as piles of tiny rock or even dust. If you are local to the area and find something that could be meteorite, please be sure to take a photo of it and record its location, before collecting the sample using a gloved hand or in aluminium foil and contacting the Natural History Museum. However, please respect local lockdown COVID-19 regulations.

The international collaboration used novel data analysis methods and the enormous computing power of the citizen science project Einstein@Home to track down the neutron star’s faint gamma-ray pulsations in data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope. Their results show that the pulsar is in orbit with a stellar companion about a sixth of the mass of our Sun. The pulsar is slowly but surely evaporating this star. The team also found that the companion’s orbit varies slightly and unpredictably over time. Using their search method, they expect to find more such systems with Einstein@Home in the future.

Searching for the so-called ‘Spider’ pulsar systems - rapidly spinning neutron stars whose high-energy outflows are destroying their binary companion star, required 10 years of precise data. The pulsars have been given arachnid names of ‘Black widows’ or ‘Redbacks’, after species of spider where the females have been seen to kill the smaller males after mating.

New research published in, , details how researchers found a neutron star rotating 377 times a second in an exotic binary system using data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope.

The astronomer’s findings were uniquely boosted by the Einstein@Home project, a network of thousands of civilian volunteers lending their home computing power to the efforts of the Fermi Telescope’s work.

The group’s search required combing very finely through the data in order not to miss any possible signals. The computing power required is enormous. The search would have taken 500 years to complete on a single computer core. By using a part of the Einstein@Home resources it was done in 2 months.

With the computing power donated by the Einstein@Home volunteers, the team discovered gamma-ray pulsations from the rapidly rotating neutron star. This gamma-ray pulsar, now known as J2039−5617, rotates about 377 times each second.

“It had been suspected for years that there is a pulsar, a rapidly rotating neutron star, at the heart of the source we now know as PSR J2039−5617,” says Lars Nieder, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover. “But it was only possible to lift the veil and discover the gamma-ray pulsations with the computing power donated by tens of thousands of volunteers to Einstein@Home,” he adds.

The celestial object has been known since 2014 as a source of X-rays, gamma rays, and light. All evidence obtained so far pointed at a rapidly rotating neutron star in orbit with a light-weight star being at the heart of the source. But clear proof was missing.

The first step to solving this riddle were new observations of the stellar companion with optical telescopes. They provided precise knowledge about the binary system without which a gamma-ray pulsar search (even with Einstein@Home’s huge computing power) would be unfeasible.

The system’s brightness varies during an orbital period depending on which side of the neutron star’s companion is facing the Earth. “For J2039-5617, there are two main processes at work,” explains Dr. Colin Clark from , lead author of the study. “The pulsar heats up one side of the light-weight companion, which appears brighter and more bluish. Additionally, the companion is distorted by the pulsar’s gravitational pull causing the apparent size of the star to vary over the orbit. These observations allowed the team to get the most precise measurement possible of the binary star’s 5.5-hour orbital period, as well as other properties of the system.”

With this information and the precise sky position from Gaia data, the team used the aggregated computing power of the distributed volunteer computing project Einstein@Home for a new search of about 10 years of archival observations of NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Improving on earlier methods they had developed for this purpose, they enlisted the help of tens of thousands of volunteers to search Fermi data for periodic pulsations in the gamma-ray photons registered by the Large Area Telescope onboard the space telescope. The volunteers donated idle compute cycles on their computers’ CPUs and GPUs to Einstein@Home.

The new knowledge of the frequency of the gamma-ray pulsations also allowed collaborators to detect radio pulsations in archival data from the Parkes radio telescope. Their results, also published in , show that the pulsar's radio emission is often eclipsed by material that has been blown off the companion star by its nearby Redback pulsar.