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).

Signing on behalf of The University of Manchester, Dr Peter Roberts, Reader in Spacecraft Engineering, is one of more than 100 signatories of the Memorandum of Principles for Space Sustainability, a field to which UoM academics contribute research and recommendations.

The principles echo the Astra Carta, a framework unveiled by the King at Buckingham Palace last month, which seeks to create and accelerate sustainable practices across the global space industry. 

Both initiatives tie in closely with specialist research at UoM including On Space, a collection of thought leadership and analysis pieces highlighting the urgent need for greater sustainability in space.   

The publication, produced by the University's policy engagement unit Policy@91ֱ��, includes a powerful article by Dr Roberts on Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) satellite technology which reduces collision risk and radiation damage, as well as facilitating end-of-life deorbit.

Dr Roberts said: “I warmly welcome the opportunity to sign the Memorandum, recognising the contribution from experts at The University of Manchester.

“The work we do on developing technologies to enable satellite operations in very low Earth orbits supports sustainability in space as satellites rapidly decay from orbit at end of life, completely avoiding the production of space debris - a key component of the Memorandum of Principles for Space Sustainability.

“Amongst other areas of ongoing activity, we have researchers examining the dark and quiet skies movement which is working incredibly hard to minimise radio noise that would otherwise create problems for ground-based radio astronomy, aspects of in-orbit servicing and manufacturing, another critical aspect of minimising the impact of space activities.

“The University of Manchester is proud to be actively involved in the global efforts to make space more sustainable.  We look forward to continuing our work with other institutions and industrial partners around the world to make space more sustainable for future generations.”    

On Space can be read and downloaded free of charge via the . 

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.”

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 .

Building infrastructure in space is currently prohibitively expensive and difficult to achieve. Future space construction will need to rely on simple materials that are easily available to astronauts, StarCrete offers one possible solution. 

The scientists behind the invention used simulated Martian soil mixed with potato starch and a pinch of salt to create the material that is twice as strong as ordinary concrete and is perfectly suited for construction work in extra-terrestrial environments.

In an article published in the journal , the research team demonstrated that ordinary potato starch can act as a binder when mixed with simulated Mars dust to produce a concrete-like material. When tested, StarCrete had a compressive strength of 72 Megapascals (MPa), which is over twice as strong as the 32 MPa seen in ordinary concrete. Starcrete made from moon dust was even stronger at over 91 MPa.

This work improves on previous work from the same team where they used astronauts’ blood and urine as a binding agent. While the resulting material had a compressive strength of around 40 MPa, which is better than normal concrete, the process had the drawback of requiring blood on a regular basis. When operating in an environment as hostile as space, this option was seen as less feasible than using potato starch.

“Since we will be producing starch as food for astronauts, it made sense to look at that as a binding agent rather than human blood. Also, current building technologies still need many years of development and require considerable energy and additional heavy processing equipment which all adds cost and complexity to a mission. StarCrete doesn’t need any of this and so it simplifies the mission and makes it cheaper and more feasible.

“And anyway, astronauts probably don’t want to be living in houses made from scabs and urine!” Dr Aled Roberts, Research Fellow at the Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, The University of Manchester and lead researcher for this project.

The team calculate that a sack (25 Kg) of dehydrated potatoes (crisps) contain enough starch to produce almost half a tonne of StarCrete, which is equivalent to over 213 brick’s worth of material. For comparison, a 3-bedroom house takes roughly 7,500 bricks to build. Additionally, they discovered that a common salt, magnesium chloride, obtainable from the Martian surface or from the tears of astronauts, significantly improved the strength of StarCrete.

The next stages of this project are to translate StarCrete from the lab to application. Dr Roberts and his team have recently launched a start-up company, , which is exploring ways to improve StarCrete so that it could also be used in a terrestrial setting.

If used on earth, StarCrete could offer a greener alternative to traditional concrete. Cement and concrete account for about 8% of global CO₂ emissions as the process by which they are made requires very high firing temperatures and amounts of energy. StarCrete, on the other hand, can be made in an ordinary oven or microwave at normal ‘home baking’ temperatures, therefore offering reduced energy costs for production.

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.”

In the UK, the space sector is worth over £16.4 billion per year and employs more than 45,000 people, while satellites and space tech underpins £360 billion per year of wider economic activity. Globally, projections reveal that the space economy

To optimise opportunities in this booming market, organisations such as the European Space Agency are looking to build space habitats, including a and ultimately . However, these types of ambitious projects will require breakthroughs in new materials to help construct resilient structures and infrastructure.

In response to this challenge, Dr Vivek Koncherry - a University alumnus and now CEO of Graphene Innovations 91ֱ��, a start-up based at the - is looking to build pressurised vessels that will create a modular space station for Low Earth Orbit. These pioneering vessels are to be made from graphene-enhanced carbon fibre as the addition of this 2D material will lightweight the habitat, as well as lending its thermal management properties to help regulate extremes of temperature.

Dr Koncherry has been working closely with global architects SOM, who have been studying the complexity of space habitation for many years as they look to .

As space explorers of the future look to go beyond the Earth’s orbit, travelling from a graphene space ship to begin building bases on the Moon – or even Mars – Dr Koncherry’s colleague Dr Aled Roberts, also part of the GEIC, is conducting research to develop bio-based building materials.

Dr Roberts, who is also part of the , explains that one of the biggest challenges for “off-world habitat construction” is the transportation of building materials, which can cost upwards of £1m 'per brick’. Until the conceptual can be built, one solution, says Dr Roberts, could be using local resources, such as lunar or Martian soil to make building materials. This thinking has led to proposed products like (aka extraterrestrial regolith biocomposites), a material using the local planetary soil and a bio-based binder to make sturdy bricks to build space habitats.

To support this lunar or Martian construction work, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at 91ֱ�� - who are expert in developing autonomous systems and resilient AI-powered robots - have helped develop sophisticated software to enable ‘co-bots’ to aid astronauts in exploration, in construction and in monitoring these new structures.

This work has been led by Professor Michael Fisher and his colleagues that form the . A specialism at 91ֱ�� involves designing and building AI-powered autonomous robots that can work in the harshest of environment, such as space, and can reliably undertake a wide range of tasks “on their own”.

Previous research in this field has looked to support improved capability of NASA’s Astronaut-Rover teams and the 91ֱ�� team continue their collaboration with NASA. Future manned missions to the Moon and Mars are expected to use autonomous rovers and robots to assist astronauts during extravehicular activity (EVA), including science, technical and construction operations.

“An important feature of the 91ֱ�� work is to develop and apply systems making sure these robots are trustworthy and do what we expect,” explained Professor Fisher.

Once a space habitat has been built, its human occupants will need to survive in their new environment - and NASA researchers have identified hydroponics as a suitable method for growing food in outer space. 91ֱ�� agri-tech experts are looking at the future of food production, which includes the application of hydroponics in vertical farming production.

Dr Beenish Siddique, founder of (below) , a UK government-backed enterprise which is also based in the GEIC, is leading a team to develop a pioneering a hydrogel called GelPonics.

This growth medium conserves water and filters out pathogens to protect plants from disease, while automated technology includes the use of a graphene-based sensor that allows remote monitoring and management of the irrigation management system. This process is much less labour intensive and ultimately the GelPonics system is designed to be used in the harshest of environments.

Combining two strengths – advanced materials and trustworthy automation – to create a USP for space

Space is a fast-growing opportunity for exponential market growth - and provides an arena for the UK engineering sector to apply its world-leading expertise. The R&D being pioneered by experts at The University of Manchester to deliver revolutionary innovation in space habitat technology provides a model approach.

91ֱ�� has combined two of its key engineering strengths – advanced materials and autonomous systems – to find a unique proposition on space tech innovation.

Dr Vivek Koncherry says: “If you want to implement nanomaterials - or indeed the next generation of advanced materials - into space application you will also need automation.

“In 91ֱ��, everything comes together – you have expertise in both advanced materials and automated systems. The skilled people we need to work with are based in the same place, which creates a unique proposition.”

Dr Koncherry has built a pilot digital manufacturing line, designed to handle materials of the future by integrating robotics, AI and IoT systems in his state-of-the-art Alchemy Lab based in the GEIC (above). He has an ambition to grow the manufacturing base in Greater 91ֱ�� and from this provide a model to underpin the UK’s national capability to making advanced products.

"Dr Koncherry adds: “Space is at the tipping point of being accessible to the commercial mainstream - the opportunities this provides are boundless. Just like in the original industrial revolution, 91ֱ�� now finds itself with the right innovation at the right time to capitalise on the space revolution.”

To find out more about The University of Manchester’s contribution to the space sector read: 

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”.

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 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."

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.

is a Horizon 2020 funded project led by 91ֱ�� and involving eight industrial and academic partners – is driving the development of a range of technologies that could enable satellites to do just that, allowing them to operate at altitudes below 450km, in Very Low Earth Orbits (VLEO).

Remote sensing satellites currently operate at about 500-800km above the Earth, above the residual atmosphere that exists at lower altitudes. But this means that observations of the ground must also take place over this range, either limiting resolution or requiring large telescopes to be used.

Project leader Dr Peter Roberts, said: “Molecules travel kilometres before they hit another gas molecule which means all of the aerodynamics is driven by individual gas molecules interacting with the satellite surface directly. It then becomes an issue of surface chemistry and physics, with those molecules hitting the surface, how they translate momentum into it and how they’re scattered off.”

The advent of lower orbit operating satellites could bring a range of benefits including reduced latency for communications satellites; improved imaging resolution for remote sensing systems and an ability to use much smaller payloads, thus reducing launch costs. Use of lower orbits could, also make it easier to recover satellites at the end of their operating lives, ensuring they don’t add to the growing problem of space debris.

The C2I awards, now in their sixth year are run by The Engineer. The awards were established to uncover and celebrate great examples of technology-led engineering collaboration across a range of different disciplines and sectors. This year the DISCOVERER project was among the winners in the aerospace and defence category.

Although the challenges in developing low-orbit satellites are significant, the multidisciplinary team – which brings together physicists, chemists, materials scientists, and assorted experts in space flight and satellite design – has already made a number of key breakthroughs.

Aerodynamic materials are key to DISCOVERER with a large portion of the work has focussed materials that are resistant to erosion in VLEO. Material developments have focussed on Such materials, combined with appropriate satellite geometries, can significantly reduce drag whilst also generating usable aerodynamic lift to enable aerodynamic attitude control. Developments here have focussed on 2D, beyond graphene materials for which 91ֱ�� University has a patent pending.

The DISCOVERER team has already overcome many of the key technical obstacles to sustained operation of satellites in VLEO. Roberts claims that the development and commercialisation of technologies that enable satellites to operate in VLEO could be key to helping the UK deliver on its stated ambition to capture 10 per cent of the £400bn global space market by 2030.

The obvious next step, he said, is to build a demonstrator satellite that applies these technologies and goes beyond the capabilities of the existing SOAR satellite. “In orbit demonstration is key,” said Roberts, “If any of these technologies are going to become commercial propositions industry really needs to know that they are going to work.”

The DISCOVERER 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.

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

Creating a reliable source of oxygen could help humanity establish liveable habitats off-Earth in an era where space travel is more achievable than ever before. Electrolysis is a popular potential method which involves passing electricity through a chemical system to drive a reaction and can be used to extract oxygen out of lunar rocks or to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This can be useful for both life support systems as well as for the in-situ production of rocket propellant.

Until now however, how lower gravitational fields on the Moon (1/6^th of Earth’s gravity) and Mars (1/3^rd of Earth’s gravity) might affect gas-evolving electrolysis when compared to known conditions here on Earth had not been investigated in detail. Lower gravity can have a significant impact on electrolysis efficiency, as bubbles can remain stuck to electrode surfaces and create a resistive layer.

New research published today in demonstrates how a team of researchers from The University of Manchester and the University of Glasgow undertook experiments to determine how the potentially life-giving electrolysis method acted in reduced gravity conditions. The team boarded a zero-g parabolic flight to escape the Earth's gravity in order to accurately conduct their experiments.

Lead engineer of the project, Gunter Just, said: “We designed and built a small centrifuge that could generate a range of gravity levels relevant to the Moon and Mars, and operated it during microgravity on a parabolic flight, to remove the influence of Earth’s gravity.

“When doing an experiment in the lab, you cannot escape the gravity of Earth; in the almost zero-g background in the aircraft, however, our electrolysis cells were only influenced by the centrifugal force and so we could tune the gravity-level of each experiment by changing the rotation speed. The centrifuge had four 25 cm arms that each held an electrolysis cell equipped with a variety of sensors, so during each parabola of  around 18 seconds we did four simultaneous experiments on the spinning system.

“We also operated the same experiments on the centrifuge between 1 and 8 g in the laboratory. In this configuration we had the arms swinging so that the downwards gravity was accounted for. It was found that the trend observed below 1 g was consistent with the trend above 1 g, which experimentally verified that high gravity platforms can be used to predict electrolysis behaviour in lunar gravity, removing the limitations of needing costly and complex microgravity conditions. In our system, we found that 11% less oxygen was produced in lunar gravity, if the same operating parameters were used as on Earth.”

The additional power requirement was more modest at around 1%. These specific values are only relevant to the small test cell but demonstrate that the reduced efficiency in low gravity environments must be taken into account when planning power budgets or product output for a system operating on the Moon or Mars. If the impact on power or product output was deemed too large for a system to function properly, some adaptations could be made that may reduce the effect of gravity, such as using a specially structured electrode surface or introducing flow or stirring.

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 .

A community of specialists at The University of Manchester have teamed up with global architect firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to research the design and manufacturing of space habitats for the space industry.

With projections that the global space economy , the innovation will raise the technology readiness level (TRL) of new lightweight composites using 2D materials for space applications.

In an international collaboration, Dr Vivek Koncherry and his team – supported by the 91ֱ��-based – are creating a scaled prototype of a space habitat with pressurised vessels designed to function in a space environment.

SOM, the architects behind the world’s tallest building - Burj Khalifa in Dubai - are contributing design and engineering expertise to the space architecture. Daniel Inocente, SOM’s senior designer in New York, said: “Designing for habitation in space poses some of the greatest challenges - it means creating an environment capable of maintaining life and integrating crew support systems.

“As architects, our role is to combine and integrate the most innovative technologies, materials, methods and above all the human experience to designing inhabited environments,” added Inocente. “Conducting research using graphene allows us to test lightweight materials and design processes that could improve the efficacy of composite structures for potential applications on Earth and future use in space.”

In the next five to 10 years most governments are expected to want a permanent presence in space to manage critical infrastructure, such as satellite networks – as well as considering the potential opportunity of accessing space-based resources and further scientific exploration.

Dr Koncherry said: “A major barrier to scaling up in time to meet this demand is the lack of advanced and automated manufacturing systems to make the specialist structures needed for living in space. One of the space industry’s biggest challenges is overcoming a lack of robotic systems to manufacture the complex shapes using advanced materials.”

The solution is incorporating graphene for advanced structural capabilities, such as radiation shielding, as well as developing and employing a new generation of robotic machines to make these graphene-enhanced structures. This technology has the potential to revolutionise high-performance lightweight structures – and could also be used for terrestrial applications in the aerospace, construction and automotive sectors.

James Baker, CEO Graphene@91ֱ��, said: “The work being led by Dr Koncherry and his colleagues is taking the development of new composites and lightweighting to another level, as well as the advanced manufacture needed to make structures from these new materials. By collaborating with SOM there are opportunities to identify applications on our own planet as we look to build habitats that are much smarter and more sustainable.”

The space habitat launch coincides with a series of world firsts for graphene in the built environment currently happening here on Earth – including the first external pour of graphene-enhanced Concretene and  - all supported by experts in the city where the super strong material was first isolated.

Tim Newns, Chief Executive of MIDAS, 91ֱ��’s inward investment agency, said: “This exciting piece of research further underlines the breadth of applications where advanced materials and in particular graphene can revolutionise global industries such as the space industry. In addition to world-leading expertise in graphene, facilities such as the new , will also support the development of advanced machines and machinery required to bring these applications to reality.”