A team of renowned planet and star hunters from Queen's University have been honoured by having their portraits displayed in an exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall this month.

Marking the 400th anniversary of when Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens, the Explorers of the Universe exhibition portrays all aspects of astronomy in the UK. It has been commissioned by The Royal Astronomical Society and the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Professors Stephen Smartt, Don Pollacco and Alan Fitzsimmons, from Queen's Astrophysics Research Centre have all been included in the exhibition which has created a unique photographic record of 'today's Galileos'.

The portraits, taken by renowned photographer Max Alexander, range from academic research and observation to the stargazing public and capture the journey of discovery on which both scientists and the public are travelling.

Queen's Professor Don Pollacco is photographed at the SuperWASP planet-finding facility at 9,000ft on the island of La Palma. He is the primary designer and one of the lead scientists in this effort, which has already discovered over 30 planets orbiting other stars. He said: "Max is a real perfectionist, it took ages to get the light right for the shot."

Professor Stephen Smartt is internationally renowned for his investigations into what type of stars explode as Supernovae. He said of his picture: "One day I would like to see a Supernova as bright as the flash pictured in this photograph. There's a possibility that if one of the most massive and nearest stars in our galaxy exploded, it would look something like this. I'm not holding my breath, it could be anytime in the next 10,000 years, so meanwhile we have to look at more distant galaxies to find these explosions."

The comets and asteroids that Professor Alan Fitzsimmons studies are all orbiting our Sun similar to a celestial Merry-Go-Round - a factor which clearly provided the inspiration for his portrait which was shot in Leicester Square, London. He said: "Sitting on a fairground horse was different to my normal job of using some of the worlds largest telescopes for research. It was certainly an interesting experience to be a model for a morning. I just struck a pose, there was nothing to it."

Well-known Queen member and astronomer Brian May is also be exhibiting his own steroscopic imagery for the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition is in the Royal Albert Hall, London until November 2nd and admission is free. More details on the event can be found at Explorers of the Universe - Royal Albert Hall while more information on the work of the Queen's astronomers is available at http://star.pst.qub.ac.uk/

Queen's School of Education lecturers Dr. Ruth Jarman and Dr. Billy McClune initiated the Physics Podcast Project and have teamed up with ARC's Prof. Stephen Smartt to bring University physics research to school pupils. Ten pupils from Regent House Grammar School (Year 13) came to Queen's to interview Prof. Smartt on the subject of supernova studies. They recorded the interview and bombarded Prof. Smartt with questions about black holes and the largest stars known in the Universe. After returning to school they carried out further research and created an exciting and original podcast for their peers.

The project was developed to make Physics more relevant and accessible to everyone and to promote the use of podcasting in schools. The postcast can be found here

QUB astronomers have once again been successful in winning the Nighttime International Time competition for the telescopes in the Canary Islands. Dr Don Pollacco is the Principal Investigator for the proposal and was awarded 42 nights on the largest telescopes (the WHT, TNG, NOT). This proposal was based on last years successful observing campaign which used the NOT to confirm 5 planets from amongst the SuperWASP candidates.

Astronomers in the Astrophysics Research Centre (ARC) of the School of Mathematics and Physics have been awarded grants totalling 3 million pounds for their research programmes.

The largest award - of 2.2 million pounds - is from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to support a range of astronomical research programmes within ARC for the 5-year period 2008 to 2013. These include studies of our Sun and other stars, the search for planets orbiting stars other than the Sun (the so-called exoplanets), investigations of supernovae (stars which end their lives in massive explosions), the detection and study of comets and asteroids, and the investigation of chemical processes in material from which stars form.

Dr Don Pollacco and Professor Francis Keenan were also awarded a grant from STFC of half a million pounds to operate the SuperWASP facility on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. SuperWASP has been extremely successful at detecting exoplanets, having found 17 of these objects in the last 2 years alone. The STFC grant will allow SuperWASP operations to continue until 2011.

Professor Keenan has been awarded over a third of a million pounds from AWE Aldermaston to renew his William Penney Fellowship for the period 2008 to 2011. This Fellowship is focused on the study of plasmas in the laboratory which mimic those found in astronomy, but also involves publicising science and physics in particular to schoolchildren and the public.

Professor Philip Dufton, Director of ARC, said 'These awards recognise the world-leading research programmes undertaken within ARC. They are particularly impressive given the current major financial squeeze on research grants from STFC. With this significant increase in funding, ARC will be able to take a leading role in several important international research initiatives in the years to come'

'SuperWASP has made a real impact in the UK and on the world stage', noted Don Pollacco. 'It is already the world leader in this field and this grant will certainly reinforce that position. We also have a few improvements to implement that will make it even better!'

Ahead of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda, a reception for UK-based Commonwealth citizens was hosted at Buckingham Palace by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. ARC astronomer, Rubina Kotak, was one of the few to receive an invitation, and attended the reception as the QUB representative.

The UK's leading team of planet-hunting astronomers, the Wide Area Search for Planets, today announced the discovery of three new planets. These extra-solar planets were seen to pass in front of, or transit, their host star. Transiting planets are important because they are the only ones that can have their mass and size measured directly, and hence we can determine what they are made of. Armed with this information, astronomers can begin to understand how these solar systems were formed.

WASP-3 is the third planet that the team has found in the Northern Sky, using the SuperWASP camera sited in the Canary Islands, while WASP-4 and WASP-5 are the first planets discovered by the WASP project's cameras in South Africa, and were confirmed by a collaboration with Swiss and French astronomers. Dr Don Pollacco, of Queen's University Belfast, said 'We are the only team to have found transiting planets in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres; for the first time we have both SuperWASP cameras running, giving complete coverage of the whole sky.'

All three planets are similar to Jupiter, but are orbiting their stars so closely that their 'year' lasts less than two days. Don Pollacco commented, These are among the shortest orbital periods yet discovered. Being so close to their star, the surface temperatures of the planets will be more than 2000 C, so it is unlikely that life as we know it could survive there. However, the finding of Jupiter-mass planets around other stars supports the idea that there are also many Earth-sized planets waiting to be discovered as the technology employed by astronomers improves.

The WASP project is the most ambitious project in the world designed to discover large planets. Funding for the project comes primarily from Queens University Belfast (who also founded the project) and the Science and Technology Facility Council (formerely the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council).

Contact:
Dr Don Pollacco, QUB, WASP Project Scientist
Tel: 02890 973512
mobile: 07788992294
email: d.pollacco@qub.ac.uk

Last Monday night, Comet Holmes was a very faint object that needed a large telescope to see it. On Tuesday night, two amateur astronomers in the Canary Islands spotted it had suddenly got much brighter. Over the next 24 hours it continued the trend until it had brightened by a factor of a million and could clearly be seen without a telescope!

The comet is easy to see with by eye, as long as you are not in the centre of a large town or city. It appears as a small fuzzy object as bright as a medium-brightness star in the constellation Perseus. It is visible in the early evening after dark in the north east sky, and is directly overhead by 1 o'clock in the morning.

As word spread around the globe, Professor Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen's University Belfast knew this was a once in a lifetime event and scrambled to find a telescope that could observe this phenomenon. "Although comets have been seen to undergo outbursts before, the scale of this dwarfed anything seen in the past century", he said.

To read more about this, click here.

Image of Comet Holmes showing the expanding cloud of dust from the outburst. The Earth is shown to scale at the lower right; in reality the comet is 244 million km distant. Credit: T. Naylor/A.Fitzsimmons/ING.

The School of Maths and Physics is delighted to host the fortnightly public lecture programme of the Irish Astronomical Association.

The Irish Astronomical Association is a public organisation formed to promote interest in astronomy in Ireland. It was formed in 1974 and draws its 200 members from both the UK and Ireland. The IAA membership ranges from complete beginners to accomplished observers and astro photographers. The lecture programme runs from September until April and will be hosted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy and held in the Bell Lecture Theatre in the Physics Building, main campus, Queen's University, Belfast. Meetings start at 7-30pm sharp and normally consist of a short talk given by an IAA member, followed by the main lecture usually given by a professional astronomer. Members of the the public who are interested in attending or joining the IAA should visit the IAA webpages for details.

Prof. Smartt, who welcomed the new season of talks said "It is a pleasure to work with the IAA to bring astronomy to the public through this series of public lectures. The general public are always asking the big questions in astronomy like what are the origins of the stars and our solar system, are their other earths out there with life on them and what is the origin of the Universe. The IAA are very active in getting professional astronomers to communicate their ideas to the public, and should be supported for fantastic efforts in raising awareness of a subject that fascinates us all."

Pat O'Neill, the president of the IAA, added "We are very grateful to Queen's for providing us with use of their facilities and appreciate their support for our lecture programme. We hope we can increase our membership further, and increase local awareness in science."

PR Guff

The first lecture of the new season is on 19th Sept. by Prof. Tom Ray from Dublin Institute of Advanced studies, entitled "The Birth Of Stars and Planets: Do we really know how the Solar System Formed?"

Dr. Don Pollacco, and the QUB SuperWASP telescope, were the stars of the BBC2 TV show "The Cosmos: A Beginners Guide" episode Other Worlds. Don explained to presenter Adam Hart-Davis how despite its small size SuperWASP is leading the hunt for planets outside our own Solar System.

Two screen grabs from the TV show - click for larger images.

Around 100 nights of telescope time have been awarded by the Canary Islands Observatories to an international proposal for the study of exoplanets. The proposal, entitled the discovery and characterisation of SuperWASP planets, is led by QUB astronomer Don Pollacco and involves a team of scientists from all over the world. The observations will go for the remainder of 2007 and the first half of 2008.

A unique discovery of two celestial explosions at exactly the same position in the sky has led astronomers to suggest they have witnessed the death of one of the most massive stars that can exist. A global collaboration of astronomers, led by Queen's University Belfast teamed up with Japanese supernova hunter Koichi Itagaki to report an amazing new discovery in Nature this week (June 14th). This is the first time such a double explosion has been observed and challenges our understanding of star-deaths.

In 2004 Koichi Itagaki discovered an exploding star in the galaxy UGC4904 (78 million light years away in the Lynx constellation), which rapidly faded from view in the space of 10 days. It was never formally announced to the community, but then he then found a new much brighter explosion in the same place only two years later in 2006, which he proposed as new supernova. Queen's astronomers Prof. Stephen Smartt and Dr. Andrea Pastorello immediately realised the implications of finding two explosions at the same position on the sky.

They began observing the 2006 supernova (named SN2006jc) with a wide range of large telescopes and analysed Itagaki's images to show that the two explosions were exactly in the same place. The most likely explanation for the 2004 explosion was probably an outburst of a very massive star like Eta-Carinae, which was observed to have a similar giant outburst in the 1850s. The 2006 supernova was the final death of the same star.

Dr. Pastorello said "We knew the 2004 explosion could be a giant outburst of very massive star, and we know that only the most massive stars can produce this type of outburst. So the 2006 supernova must have been the death of the same star, possibly a star 50 to 100 times more massive than the Sun. And it turns out that SN2006jc is a very weird supernova - unusually rich in the chemical element helium which supports our idea of a massive star outburst then death."

Dr. Pastorello used UK telescopes on La Palma (the Liverpool Telescope, and William Herschel Telescope) in a combined European and Asian effort to monitor the energetics of SN2006jc. He showed that the exploding star must have been a Wolf-Rayet star, which are the carbon-oxygen remains of originally very high mass stars.

Prof Smartt is funded by a prestigious EURYI fellowship to study the birth and death of stars. He said "The supernova was the explosion of a massive star that had lost its outer atmosphere, probably in a serious of minor explosions like the one Koichi found in 2004. The star was so massive it probably formed a black hole as it collapsed. This is the first time two explosions of the same star have been found, and it challenges our theories of the way stars live and die. "

Although this is the first time two such explosions have been found to be coincident, they could be more frequent than currently thought. The future Pan-STARRS project, a new telescope with the world's largest digital camera which can survey the whole sky once a week could search for these peculiar supernovae. Queen's are partners in the Pan-STARRS science team and hope to use it to understand how the most massive stars in the Universe die.

Further information: Prof. Stephen Smartt (07876014103), Dr. Andrea Pastorello (Mobile: 07990964240)
Preprint Listen to Dr Pastorello's Nature podcast

Queen's astronomers (led by Rubina Kotak) have been awarded about 50 hours of observing time on the largest space-based infrared telescope facility, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, to study gigantic stellar explosions known as supernovae. The idea is to exploit the novel wavelength coverage to answer key questions about the way in which the explosion occurs, and to measure the amount and types of elements that are synthesised in the explosion. In parallel, we will attempt to objectively address the issue of whether certain types of supernovae which arise from stars at least 8 times more massive than our sun -- known as core-collapse supernovae -- are responsible for producing the dust that we see when the Universe was only a small fraction of its current age. These observations (at mid-infrared wavelengths) cannot be carried out using even the largest telescopes on the planet due to severe contamination from the Earth's atmosphere.

Where does cosmic dust come from?
Cosmic dust grains are the smallest solid objects that can exist in the Universe; they are also the building blocks of planets. Recently, there has been mounting evidence for the presence of vast quantities of dust when the Universe was very young (less than one billion years old). This has presented us with a considerable dilemma: the preferred site for dust formation is in the rarefied atmospheres of evolved low-mass stars. However, these low-mass stars would need to be almost as old as the Universe itself before they even begin to produce large quantities of dust! Now the stars that produce type II supernovae are more massive and therefore shorter-lived, making them rather natural candidates for dust production. But are they? Can they? Do they? The idea that type II SNe are dust factories rests on remarkably meagre observational evidence. As warm dust emits most strongly at mid-infrared wavelengths, the Spitzer Space Telescope is ideally suited to studying dust emission from supernovae.

QUB astronomer Don Pollacco has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship starting in October 2007. The goal of this award is to develop ground based techniques for the detection of low mass planets in extrasolar systems.

It is not often that professional scientists rub shoulders with TV presenters, pop stars and best-selling authors. Yet that is what happened in April to Dr. Don Pollacco and Prof. Alan Fitzsimmons of the Astrophysics Research Centre.

The QUB astronomers were invited to the Birthday Party of the BBC's Sky at Night programme. Sir Patrick Moore has been presenting this television show since April 1957, and to commemorate this achievement a party was held at his house. As previous guests on the programme, Prof. Fitzsimmons and Dr. Pollacco were invited to join in the celebrations of its 50th year.

"It was quite a star-spangled evening" Alan Fitzsimmons said. "Not only did we meet a lot of old friends from the astronomical community, it was a bit of a novelty to also encounter people like Mylene Klass and Terry Pratchet. It reminds you that astronomy is interesting to so many people in so many backgrounds".

Don Pollacco said "Its at times like this you realise quite what an effect Patrick Moore has had on astronomy, I dont know how many times I heard professional astronomers saying that without the Sky at Night they would never have entered astronomy."

Both astronomers thoroughly enjoyed the evening, and wish The Sky at NIght many more years of success.

The 2nd Holywood Scout group have been studying for the Scout Astronomy badge for several weeks with Prof. Smartt from the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen's.

Prof. Smartt talked to the Scout group in February, explaining the nature of our solar system, and the stars in our Galaxy. They learned about visible eye objects such as the bright planets and the Plaeides star cluster. One of the most important attributes for an astronomer, or scientist or engineer is to ask questions. The Scouts were encouraged to ask questions all evening and three prizes were given to the best ones, including a free family ticket to the Armagh Planetarium. Prof Smartt said "I'm always amazed at the amount and diversity of questions from young minds. The boys have great fun doing all types of scout badges and activities and the astronomy badge is a great way to increase their awareness of science".

The Scouts carried out an observing project to observe the moon every night for a month and draw its phase. They also had to answer questions about stars and planets and the faint band of light that stretches across the sky - our Milky Way Galaxy. They see all these celestial during their regular Scout camps under dark skies in Castle Ward, Downpatrick and at Culzean Castle in Ayr, Scotland. Scout Leader Greg Brennan said "The boys enjoyed doing a very different badge and we look forward to observing the sky when we go camping in the summer."

While having fun in exploring the wonder of the Universe through their own observations and seeing inspiring images from the Hubble Space Telescope, we hope that some of the group will be inspired to become future scientists and engineers.

'Science Fiction or Science Fact?' will be the question addressed by Professor Francis Keenan and Dr Robert Ryans of Queen's University over the coming months as the duo has been awarded funding from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), for the development of a novel presentation to schoolchildren and the general public on the science in science-fiction films and television programmes.

Funded under the auspices of the PPARC Public Understanding of Science scheme, Prof Keenan and Dr Ryans presentations will use clips from various films and television shows to highlight how science-fiction film and television writers usually get the science completely wrong.

The title of the first presentation, Captain, I can't change the laws of physics!, was a phrase used by Chief Engineer Scott to Captain Kirk in Star Trek, often before he changed them considerably. It deals with the accuracy of science in a number of areas popular in science-fiction films and TV programmes such as space travel and contact with aliens, while the second presentation, We come in peace, shoot to Kill! covers weaponry and wars in science-fiction in detail.

Explaining the rationale behind the development of the presentations, Professor Keenan, Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics at Queens said: With fifty per cent of the top 30 grossing films of all time being in the science-fiction genre and programmes such as Dr Who still winning viewer awards, it is no surprise that most of the general publics only exposure to the world of science is what they see in science-fiction films and television. As a consequence, many people believe what they see on screen is scientifically accurate, at least on some level.

Occasionally scenes will be presented as a possibility in order to create dramatic effect, - for example a spaceship will not make a sound in space due to the vacuum, but often it adds to a film and is dramatically better if sounds are made - however, in most cases the errors are due to ignorance or carelessness.

Our presentations will convey the real science in a stimulating and fun manner and having presented them to several groups of schoolchildren and teachers, we are now very excited at bringing the world of Science to a wider audience.

A film crew from Screenhouse productions, which included the science presenter Adam Hart Davis, visited SuperWASP-N during January. Screenhouse are producing a series of 6 half hour programmes for the BBC (to be shown in the summer) one of which will be about extra-solar planets. They filmed the instrument in operation and discussed with Don Pollacco observations of extra-solar planets.

Following the completion of their Ph.D. studies in the Astronomy Research Centre, several QUB graduates have been awarded prestigious research fellowships:

• Colin Snodgrass, who studied distant comets beyond Mars, has a fellowship at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Santiago Chile.
• Shaun Bloomfield, who worked on solar physics, has moved to a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute in Lindau Germany.
• Ryan Milligan, who observed explosive events on the sun, has moved to Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington DC USA, where he will use the NASA RHESSI satellite to continue his studies.
• Marco Matranga, who investigated the X-ray emission from cool stars, is working at the Center for Astrophysics in Harvard Massachusets, USA.

Drawing 60 attendees from 18 academic institutions around the world, the Queen's University Astrophysics Research Centre hosted the fist major meeting of 2007 for researchers in the interdisciplinary field of Astrochemistry. Attendees travelled from places including London, Ohio, Leiden, Goteborg, Stockholm and California to discuss recent discoveries, forge new collaborations and exchange ideas for future research into the chemistry of the universe.

17 oral presentations and 20 posters were presented, highlighting individual and group research efforts on topics such as the formation and evolution of molecules in space and on interstellar dust grains, the Herschel space-mission, interstellar ices, and star and planet formation. Research results presented were based on cutting-edge laboratory experimental techniques, astronomical observations and theoretical calculations.

The following invited presentations were given:

• Eric Herbst, Ohio State University: "The role of surface chemistry in the formation of large interstellar molecules and the growth of grain mantles"
• Klaus Pontoppidan, Caltech: "New results from ice mapping of water, CO, and CO2 in protostellar cores"
• Liv Hornekaer, Aarhus University: "H2 formation on dust grains under PDR and post-shock conditions"
• Martin McCoustra, Heriot-Watt University: "Laboratory studies of desorption processes from model interstellar ices"

The prize for best poster presentation was awarded to Karin Oberg from Leiden University for her poster entitled "Photodesorption of CO ice".

Steve Keil (Director of the National Solar Observatory, USA) and Jeremy Wagner (ATST Program Manager) visited ARC recently to discuss QUB and UK involvement in the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST).

At an estimated cost of $220 million, the ATST will have a 4 meter mirror and will resolve structures as small as 20 km (about 10 miles) on the solar surface. This is the equivalent to finding a small coin from a distance of 200 miles.

The telescope will be installed at an altitude of 3,100 meters on the island of Maui (Hawai). ATST will revolutionize our understanding of the sun and ARC staff at QUB are looking forward to contributing to its success.

Right: The proposed ATST on the Haleakala 'The House of the Sun' volcano.

Dr Mihalis Mathioudakis, Prof Francis Keenan and Dr Robert Ryans of the Astrophysics Research Centre in the School of Mathematics and Physics have been awarded a grant of 250,000 pounds from Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), to construct and commission the Rapid Oscillations in the Solar Atmosphere (ROSA) instrument.

ROSA will be a state-of-the-art high-speed solar imaging system, able to take up to 200 solar images a second simultaneously at 6 different wavelengths. The instrument will be commissioned and used at the Sacramento Peak National Solar Observatory in New Mexico, the leading US national research facility for ground-based solar observing.

ROSA will be used for a range of projects, and in particular will help address the long-standing problem of how the solar corona is heated. The corona is a region of gas, at a temperature of millions of degrees, lying above the solar surface, and is only visible during total solar eclipses. Why it is so much hotter than the surface of the Sun, which is at a temperature of only a few thousand degrees, has baffled scientists for a long time.

Said Dr Mathioudakis, 'ROSA will open a new window in the field of solar physics, and will be used for a wide range of research projects including the study of oscillations and waves phenomena throughout the solar atmosphere. It will revolutionize our current understanding of the Sun'.

Right: Image of a solar prominence taken with the Extreme Ultraviolet Telescope on the Solar Heliospheric Observatory. ROSA will study the high frequency variations of prominences by obtaining hundreds of images at the blink an eye.

Astronomers from Queens University Belfast, in conjunction with Durham University, The University of Edinburgh and several other major research institutions in Europe and America, have signed an agreement with astronomers at the University of Hawaii to use the most advanced telescope system ever built to rapidly scan the skies.

The Belfast astronomers will exploit a revolutionary new survey telescope on Haleakala on the island of Maui, known as Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1), which is expected to discover billions of new stars, galaxies and solar system objects, including potential killer asteroids that threaten the Earth.

A primary goal of the Pan-STARRS project will be to survey nearby space for asteroids and comets that could collide with the Earth in the future, so-called Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). While current searches are sensitive to asteroids a km across or larger, Pan-STARRS will be the first telescope to discover large numbers of smaller NEOs.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons of the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queens University will be studying these new objects to investigate what fraction are comets and what they are made of. Speaking about Queens involvement in the project he said: We will be concentrating on the smallest Near-Earth Objects, as we know very little about these bodies. Yet they hit our Earth much more frequently than large asteroids and comets, so we need to know their physical and chemical make-up if we want to understand the risk posed by them.

By monitoring the whole sky every week, Pan-STARRS will also become the world's leading search for exploding stars called supernovae. A supernova is a fantastically energetic explosion at the end of the life of a very massive star. They are a billion times brighter than the sun and can be seen in the distant Universe.

Explaining further how Pan-STARRS will be used to measure the energies released in the explosions and the nature of the exploding stars themselves, Professor Stephen Smartt, a fellow member of the project team from Queens Astrophysics Research Centre added: "These supernovae produced the elements of oxygen, calcium, silicon, and iron which are fundamental to the evolution of the Universe and life itself.

We were created from supernovae residue, and our aim is to understand the physics of the explosions and how the elements are produced. The Pan-STARRS project gives Queen's an opportunity to be a world leading voice in this exciting area of astrophysics".

Having achieved First Light in June of this year, the PS1 telescope will also shortly be fitted with the worlds largest digital camera, currently under construction at the UH Institute for Astronomy in Manoa, under the leadership of John Tonry. With a resolution of 1.4 billion pixels, about 300 times as many as a typical commercial digital unit, the camera will be used to capture images generated by the telescopes mirror which measures 1.8 meters in diameter.

Over 30 world-renowned scientists and their graduate students have committed themselves to analysing the unprecedented flood of data from PS1 over the next three and half years and Kenneth Chambers, from the University of Hawaii, who as Project Scientist is responsible for carrying out the PS1 survey said: "We decided to recruit a number of top astronomers to join us in order to make the best use of this fantastic instrument.

Rolf Kudritzki, Director of UH's Institute for Astronomy added: "We are delighted to have assembled a powerful consortium that includes the prestigious Max Planck Society in Germany, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Las Cumbres Observatory in the USA and Durham, Edinburgh and Queens Universities in the United Kingdom".

Developed by astronomers at the University of Hawaii, Pan-STARRS is the first stage of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System project which is the brainchild of IfA's Nick Kaiser.

The consortium will contribute about $10m to cover the cost of operating the telescope in Hawaii.

Further information on the project can be found at the Pan-STARRS website, while the website for the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queens can be viewed here.

For further information please contact Lisa Mitchell, Communications Office. Tel: 028 90975384. Contact details for Professors Smartt and Fitzsimmons are available here.

Finding planets that pass in front of their parent stars is so important to understanding how planets form that the European Space Agency will shortly launch the 35M COROT satellite to find them. However a team of UK, French and Swiss astronomers, including staff from Queens University Belfast (QUB), is already paving the way from the ground, with the discovery of two new Jupiter-sized planets around stars in the constellations of Andromeda and Delphinus.

These planets are the first to be found during the UK-led SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets) programme. Using wide-angle camera lenses, backed by top-quality CCD cameras from Andor Technology (a spin-out company from QUB), the SuperWASP team have been repeatedly surveying several million stars over vast swathes of the sky, looking for the tiny dips in the starlight caused when a planet passes in front of its star. This is known as a transit.

Confirmation of the new finds came earlier this month when the SuperWASP team joined forces with the Swiss and French users of SOPHIE, a powerful new French-built instrument at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence. SOPHIE was able to detect a slight wobble in each stars motion as the planets orbited around them. Together the two types of observation confirmed the existence and nature of the planets.

The partnership between the two instruments is particularly powerful SuperWASP finds candidate planets and determines their radii, and SOPHIE confirms their nature and weighs them, said Dr. Don Pollacco of the School of Mathematics and Physics at QUB, the SuperWASP Project Scientist. Dr Pollacco also leads the SuperWASP team at QUB, which comprises Profs Francis Keenan and Alan Fitzsimmons, and Drs Rachel Street, Damian Christian, Yogesh Joshi, and Robert Ryans.

These discoveries would not have been possible without the significant financial support that QUB provided for the SuperWASP project at its inception, said Prof Keenan, Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics.

Approximately 200 planets around other stars are now known, but almost all of them were discovered using large telescopes costing tens of millions of pounds. This requires laborious study of one star at a time, in the hope of finding stars with planets around them.

In contrast, the SuperWASP telescopes look at hundreds of thousands of stars at a time, allowing all those with transiting planet candidates to be identified in one go.

In only a dozen or so of the known systems, has a planet been observed to pass in front of its star. Although the number of known transiting exoplanets is still very small, they hold the key to the formation of planetary systems, and an understanding of the origin of our own Earth. They are the only planets whose sizes and densities can be determined reliably.

The stars around which the new planets are orbiting are both similar to the Sun. One is a little hotter, brighter and bigger, whilst the other is a little cooler, fainter and smaller. The larger star, in the constellation of Andromeda, is over 1,000 light years away. The smaller star, in the constellation of Delphinus, is only about 500 light years distant. Although both stars are too faint to be seen with the naked eye, they are easily detectable with a small telescope.

The planets themselves, known as WASP-1b and WASP-2b, are of a type known as hot Jupiters. They are both giant gas planets, like Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, but they are much closer to their parent star.

Whilst Jupiter is nearly 800 million km from the Sun and orbits it once every 12 years, WASP-1b is only 6 million km from its star and orbits once every 2.5 days, WASP-2b is only 4.5 million km from its star and orbits once every 2 days. The very close orbits mean that these planets must be even hotter than the planet Mercury in our solar system, which is nearly 60 million km from the Sun and has a surface temperature of over 400C.

The SuperWASP team are currently planning follow-up observations of the two new planetary systems with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope in order to measure more accurately the sizes and temperatures of the planets, and also to look for indications of any other planets in these systems.

SuperWASP is expected to find dozens more transiting planets over the next few years.

Further information: Please contact Dr Don Pollacco at 077 8899 2294

The scientist who realised his dream of hitting a comet this summer will give a public lecture next week at Queen's University Belfast.

In July, the NASA Deep Impact mission achieved its primary goal of hitting comet Tempel 1 with a spacecraft at 22,000 mph. The images sent back from space stunned the world.

Professor Mike A'Hearn from the University of Maryland was the person who proposed the space mission to NASA and was in charge of Deep Impact to make sure it was a success. He is visiting Belfast next week and will be showing the amazing results to the public.

In his lecture, Professor A'Hearn (whose family originated from Ireland) will explain why the mission was important, what happened during the encounter and what scientists have learned so far from the pictures and data sent back by the mothership.

The Deep Impact mission encountered comet Tempel 1 on 04 July this year. A copper projectile weighing a third of a tonne hit this icy body at 10 km per second, excavating tons of material from below the surface. The mothership flew past at a safe distance of 500 km (300 miles) and transmitted pictures and data back to Earth.

Back on Earth, QUB astronomers watched the effect on the comet from a distance of 130 million km (80 million miles). Queen's University Professor Alan Fitzsimmons was one of those astronomers who observed the impact using a telescope in Hawaii.

"This was a beautiful experiment designed to really tell us what comets are made of, where they come from and how they evolve", said Professor Fitzsimmons.

On the other side of the world, another Queen's academic Dr Stephen Lowry used another telescope based at the Canary Islands to study the impact.

Dr. Lowry said: "It became clear early on, from images sent back from the probe and images taken from observatories on Earth, that the impact produced far more dust than expected which may force a rethink of how comets are composed. This is just one of the exciting discoveries that resulted from the mission."

The lecture will take place at 7.00pm on Wednesday 07 December in the Larmor Lecture Theatre in the Department of Physics and Astronomy (next to the Whitla Hall) at the University.

Entrance to the lecture is free. People wishing to attend should email the Department of Physics and Astronomy at physics@qub.ac.uk or call 028 9097 3941 and leave their details and the number of people wishing to attend.

For further information, please contact:
Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, School of Mathematics and Physics, on 028 9097 3124 or a.fitzsimmons@qub.ac.uk
Dr. Stephen Lowry, School of Mathematics and Physics, on 028 9097 3692 or s.c.lowry@qub.ac.uk

A leading young researcher from Queen's University, who has just returned from Budapest to collect a prestigious award, has just learnt he has earned a second accolade.

Dr Stephen Smartt has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme prize for his research into supernovae - the explosions that signal the end of a star's life creating heavier elements such as oxygen and iron and dispersing them through space.

The £50,000 prize is awarded to individuals (under 36) who have excelled in their field, gained an international standing and of whom it is felt that their best research is yet to come.

Each year approximately 25 awards are given to individuals in five selected subject areas. Dr Smartt was one of six astronomy and astrophysics researchers to receive the prize. But this is not the only accolade he has won.

Earlier this year he was one of two UK astronomers to receive the prestigious European Young Investigator (EURYI) award for his research. The five-year award is worth about 1.2 million Euro or about £827,000 - almost financially equivalent to a Nobel Prize Ð and is only given out to 25 researchers around the globe.

A special ceremony for all of the 2005 EURYI Award winners was held on Wednesday 09 November in Budapest, Hungary, before the beginning of the World Science Forum in Budapest on 10-12 November.

Dr Smartt said he felt very honoured and grateful to receive both prizes because they would allow him to build a leading group at Queen's.

"Supernovae are key to many of the current challenges in astronomy," he explained. "They provide evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe and the existence of the mysterious Dark Energy which drives this process. Yet very little is known about supernova progenitor stars."

There have only been four cases in the world where astronomers have identified what a star looked like before the supernova occurred. Dr Smartt confirmed three of those examples.

"In this project I want to understand what types of stars produce supernovae. These explosions have produced the oxygen we breath, the calcium in our bones and the minerals the earth is made of. They have given our solar system the chemical ingredients for life. We want to understand their origins to help trace the evolution of Universe"

Note: The Philip Leverhulme Prizes commemorate the contribution made by Philip Leverhulme, the Third Viscount Leverhulme and grandson of the Leverhulme Trust's founder, William Hesketh Lever. Since 2001, the Trustees have awarded 106 of these Prizes totalling £5.3 million of funding to support and recognise research in subjects as diverse as Classics and Software Technology.

The EURYI Awards scheme was developed by the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCS) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) to attract outstanding young researchers from anywhere in the world to work in Europe for the further development of European science, contributing to building up the next generation of leading European researchers. The first round of the scheme was launched in September 2003, and resulted in 25 Awards being made in July 2004.

Candidates are selected by a two-stage process, firstly at the national level by the relevant Participating Organisation and secondly at the international level by high-level scientific panels managed by the ESF. ESFÕs role in the coordination and selection processes of EURYI is supported by funds from the European Commission's Framework Programme 6.

For further information, please contact:
Dr Stephen Smartt, Queen's University Belfast, 01223 330803 Mobile 07754 782758 email S.Smartt@qub.ac.uk
Emily Moulton, Communications Office, 028 9097 5384 or news.release@qub.ac.uk

A researcher from Queen's University Belfast, Dr Stephen Smartt, has won a prestigious European Young Investigator (EURYI) award to further his world-leading astronomy research.

The five-year award is worth about 1.2 million Euro or about £827,000 Ð almost equivalent to a Nobel prize!

The European Young Investigator (EURYI) Awards are given to 25 researchers from around the globe to create world-class research teams in Europe. Winners are selected on the basis of their academic and research excellence and their future potential. The funding is used to develop a research team to engage full time with key research in the scientist's field.

Dr Stephen Smartt is one of only two UK astronomers to have won an award. Dr Smartt will be looking at the death of stars, to gain a better understanding of supernovae - the explosions that signal the end of a stars life, creating the heavier elements (such as oxygen and iron) and dispersing them through space. Supernovae are key to many of the current challenges in astronomy. They provide evidence of the accelerating expansion of Universe and hence for the existence of the mysterious Dark Energy which drives this process. Yet very little is known about supernova progenitor stars and in only four cases do astronomers actually know what the star looked like before the supernova occurred. Dr Smartt has confirmed the nature of three of these examples.

Dr Smartt said "In this project, I aim to find twenty to thirty progenitors of supernovae, so that we can study how massive they are and what type of explosion they produce. We believe that the diversity seen in supernovae explosions is due to the destruction of different star types, but at the moment we don't have the evidence to back this up."

The astronomy researchers applied to the scheme via the UK funding agency the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC). Professor Keith Mason, Chief Executive of PPARC said "Competition for the EURYI awards is intense and worldwide - it is a great credit to these two outstanding UK astronomers and their host Universities that they have won this award. We can expect great things of them in the years to come."

The EURYI Awards are offered by 20 European national research organisations in an open competition with no "juste retour", with candidates selected on the basis of their academic and research excellence and their future potential. Competition is intensive, with 622 applications received for this second round of EURYI awards.

The EURYI Awards scheme was developed by the European Heads of Research Councils (EUROHORCS) and the European Science Foundation (ESF) to attract outstanding young researchers from anywhere in the world to work in Europe for the further development of European science, contributing to building up the next generation of leading European researchers. The first round of the scheme was launched in September 2003, and resulted in 25 Awards being made in July 2004.

Candidates are selected by a two-stage process, firstly at the national level by the relevant Participating Organisation and secondly at the international level by high-level scientific panels managed by the ESF. ESFÕs role in the coordination and selection processes of EURYI is supported by funds from the European CommissionÕs Framework Programme 6.

Contacts: Dr Stephen Smartt, Queen's University Belfast, Tel: 01223 330803 (NB Dr Smartt is visiting Cambridge University at the moment, this number will reach him there). Mobile 07754 782758 Email S.Smartt@qub.ac.uk
Dolores Vischer, Queens University Belfast Press Office, 028 9097 5320 Email d.vischer@qub.ac.uk

Notes for Editors The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the UK's strategic science investment agency. It funds research, education and public understanding in four areas of science - particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and space science.

PPARC is government funded and provides research grants and studentships to scientists in British universities, gives researchers access to world-class facilities and funds the UK membership of international bodies such as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), and the European Space Agency. It also contributes money for the UK telescopes overseas on La Palma, Hawaii, Australia and in Chile, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, which includes the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank observatory.

PPARC's Public Understanding of Science and Technology Awards Scheme funds both small local projects and national initiatives aimed at improving public understanding of its areas of science.

Astronomers at Queen's University are looking forward to playing an important role in NASA's Deep Impact mission.

Using telescopes around the world and in space, the Belfast scientists will be studying what happens when the spacecraft hits the comet at a speed of 10 kilometres per second (7 miles per second).

The Deep Impact mission will encounter Comet Tempel-1 on 4 July this year. A copper projectile weighing a third of a tonne will strike this icy body at high velocity, excavating a crater somewhere between 40m and 400m across. The main spacecraft will fly-past at a safe distance of 500km (300 miles), and peer into the resulting hole to discover what is inside a comet.

Back on Earth, astronomers across the world will be watching the comet from a distance of 130 million kilometres (80 million miles), studying the effects of the impact.

Four astronomers in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Division at Queen's will be carefully watching to see what happens using a variety of telescopes.

"This is a fantastic experiment designed to really tell us what comets are made of, where they come from and how they evolve", said Professor Alan Fitzsimmons from Queen's.

Professor Fitzsimmons will be in Hawaii at the time of impact, using the Faulkes Telescope to observe the impact itself and its immediate aftermath.

Dr Stephen Lowry will be in La Palma in the Canary Islands, using the Isaac Newton Telescope to observe the dust, gas and plasma in the comet. Dr. Lowry said "Observations of the comet from Earth before, during, and after the probe impact form a critical part of the mission. Our observations of the comet's coma and plasma tail are part of a coordinated world-wide campaign to record every possible outcome from the impact."

Mr Colin Snodgrass is a PhD student and will be in Belfast but controlling the robotic Liverpool Telescope also in La Palma. "The impact will release material from the inside of a comet, something which we have never been able to observe before", he said. Mr Snodgrass will be studying how the make-up of the dust in the comet changes after the impact.

In some senses using the most distant telescope, Dr Damian Christen will be using NASA's Chandra Space Telescope to study the X-rays emitted from the comet before and after the encounter. Dr. Christian said "It was a big surprise when X-rays were discovered from comets back in 1996, and although Tempel-1 has a modest amount of X-ray emission normally, we expect a big increase in X-ray emission during and possibly after the impact."

The impact on the comet will not noticeably alter its orbit around the Sun. It is also highly unlikely to be seen by eye, although from Belfast it might be visible in telescopes low down in the Western sky after sunset.

For further information contact: Professor Alan Fitzsimmons, Dr Stephen Lowry, Dr Damian Christian, or Mr Colin Snodgrass. Contact details are available here.

Astronomers in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division within the School of Mathematics and Physics have been awarded a grant of nearly 1.4 million pounds by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).

The grant, awarded for a 5-year period, will allow Queen's astronomers to undertake world-leading research in a number of high priority areas, including the study of the Sun and other stars, investigations of supernovae (stellar explosions which release enormous amounts of energy), and the study of comets and asteroids.

Funding has also been provided for the operation and exploitation of the SuperWASP telescope at the ING Observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands. SuperWASP is part-funded by Queen's University and is being used for a number of projects, in particular to search for planets orbiting stars other than the Sun.

Prof Francis Keenan, Principal Investigator for the grant and also Head of the School of Mathematics and Physics, said "This is a great success for the Astrophysics Research Division and also for Queen's University. It is a recognition of the excellence of the astrophysics research performed at Queen's. The grant award is for 5 years and hence will provide major funding for our research programmes up to the next Research Assessment Exercise and beyond."

A major topic of study within the grant will be on the study of near-Earth objects that can hit our planet. Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons, who leads the Division's efforts in this area, said "Being able to plan our research over this length of time ensures that we can keep our leading role in observational astronomy in the UK ".

Similarly, Dr Mihalis Mathioudakis leads the Division's research programme on the study of the Sun, much of which uses an instrument called the Rapid Dual Imager (RDI) constructed at Queen's University, which obtains images of the Sun at very high frequency (up to 80 images per second). Said Dr Mathioudakis "This grant will allow us to continue and develop our solar physics research programmes with RDI, and ensure that Queen's maintains its leading role in high frequency solar observing".

On 11th November 1572 the renowned Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe witnessed a titanic supernova explosion, although at the time he was unaware of the phenomena he was seeing. Nevertheless, Tychos meticulous record of the brightening and dimming of the incident allowed latter day astronomers to identify his discovery as that of a Type la supernova. But a mystery still remained. The exploding star should have been accompanied by a second star in order to conform to the theory that Type la supernovae arise from binary star systems containing a normal star and a burned-out white dwarf - but the accompanying star was never found until now.

An international team of astronomers, led by Dr. Pilar Ruiz-Lapuente, used a combination of the world's most powerful telescopes to identify the probable surviving companion star to Tycho's titanic supernova explosion and announced this discovery in the journal Nature. As part of the team, Dr. Stephen Smartt of The Queens University Belfast used the UKs William Herschel Telescope on La Palma to look at every possible star near the centre of the Tycho supernova remnant. Initial data from the William Herschel Telescope showed one very peculiar star to be shooting across the sky with a velocity more than three times faster than its neighbours.

Javier Mendez from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes and a member of the discovery team said "It was the high speed of the star that first caught our attention. Data obtained later on with the William Herschel Telescope showed that the suspect has the high heavy-element content typical of stars from the Milky Ways disk not the halo giving credence to our findings."

When the system was disrupted by the white dwarf's explosion, the star went hurtling off into space, retaining the velocity of its orbital motion much like a stone thrown by a sling. The result was confirmed with the giant Keck Telescope and precise observations with the Hubble Space Telescope.

This discovery provides the first direct evidence supporting the long-held belief that Type Ia supernovae come from binary star systems containing a normal star and a burned-out white dwarf star. The normal star spills material onto the dwarf, which eventually triggers a massive thermonuclear explosion somewhat similar to the mechanism in a hydrogen bomb.

Dr Stephen Smartt added. "Type la supernovae explosions are incredibly, almost unbelievably energetic. The energy emitted is equivalent to a billion times the luminosity of the Sun and because of this they have been used to measure the expansion rate of the Universe and are the key evidence for the existence of dark energy. However we are struggling for evidence to confirm theories of how these supernovae physically come about. The discovery of a probable companion star should allow us to test the computer models of how Tychos supernova exploded."

The star found by the team is an aging version of our Sun and it fits one of the models of how these supernovae are produced. In this binary system model, the more massive star in the pair will age faster and eventually becomes a white dwarf star. When the slower-evolving companion star subsequently ages to the point where it begins to balloon in size, it spills hydrogen onto the dwarf. The hydrogen accumulates until the white dwarf reaches a critical and precise mass threshold, called the Chandrasekhar limit, where it explodes as a titanic nuclear bomb.

An alternative theory of Type Ia supernovae is that two white dwarfs orbit each other, gradually losing energy through the emission of gravitational radiation (gravity waves). As they lose energy, they spiral in toward each other and eventually merge, resulting in a white dwarf whose mass reaches the Chandrasekhar limit, and explodes. "Tycho's supernova does not appear to have been produced by this mechanism, since a probable surviving companion has been found," says Prof. Alex Filippenko of the University of California at Berkeley, a co-author on this research. He adds that, nevertheless, it is still possible there are two different evolutionary paths to Type Ia supernovae.

British astronomers are providing a vital component to the world-wide effort of identifying and monitoring rogue asteroids and comets. From this month, the UK Astrometry and Photometry Programme (UKAPP) for Near-Earth Objects, based at Queens University, Belfast, will track Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and feed their crucial information into the international programme of protecting the Earth from any future impact by a comet or asteroid.

On average 30-40 NEOs are discovered each month - asteroids and comets that could one day collide with the Earth. Over 3000 NEOs have now been found, and a world-wide effort involving professional and amateur astronomers attempts to keep track of these objects. Now a team of astronomers at Queen's University Belfast will be tracking these objects each week using large high-performance telescopes.

UKAPP is using the Faulkes Telescope North, a robotic telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui built primarily for educational use by the Faulkes Telescope Project. At the end of this year they will also start using the twin Faulkes Telescope South at Siding Spring, Australia. The telescopes' mirror size of 2-m allows astronomers to see fainter NEOs than most other facilities regularly used for this task. Test observations took place in September, and the full programme begins in October. The work is supported by a grant from the British National Space Centre (BNSC) and the Particle Physics Research Council (PPARC).

Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons, the project leader, said "Previously we used UK-funded telescopes on La Palma, but for various reasons they could only track a couple of objects per month on average. The robotic nature of the Faulkes telescopes means that it is much easier for us to observe numerous NEOs than can be achieved by using conventional telescopes." Once the images of the NEOs are taken, Dr Fitzsimmons and his colleagues transfer them to an astronomical computer network in Northern Ireland via the internet. The positions of the NEOs are then measured and communicated to the Minor Planer Center in Harvard in America; the world's clearing house and repository for measurements of NEOs.

Although most of the time will be spent tracking NEOs, some of the time will also be spent studying their physical make-up. Dr Fitzsimmons said "This is not only scientifically interesting. If we are going to be hit by one of these things in the future, we need as much information as possible to allow us to plan any course of mitigation".

An important aspect is that school classes and science centres around the country can also do this work. In a separate endeavour from UKAPP, the Faulkes Telescope Project assists school children to track NEOs using specially designed educational projects.

Dave Bowdley, Faulkes Telescope Educational Programmes Manager said, "This project provides a fantastic opportunity for schools to work alongside the professionals in an exciting area of research."

QUB UKAPP Home Page

A Queen's University astronomer, whose research involves using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to take stunning images of the galaxies, has had his work showcased by NASA.

Lecturer Dr Stephen Smartt is based in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division of the School of Mathematics and Physics. Last month NASA featured some of his recent work with Hubble in a media release illustrating one of the magnificent images he has taken.

The beautiful galaxy NGC3949 is a typical spiral galaxy that looks just like our own Milky Way. It has a blue disk of young stars and a bright central bulge of older red stars. Dr. Smartt and his team have taken pictures of several hundred galaxies to study the most massive stars in the Universe which can be up to 100 times larger than the Sun. They are hoping that some day one of these stars will explode as a supernova and they can then look back to pinpoint the exact star that has exploded. Only three such supernova 'mother stars' have ever been identified, two by Dr. Smartt's team.

Dr Smartt explains: "When a massive star dies its central core collapses and you get a huge explosion of energy. It is only then that a star can be identified. Obviously we don't know when this is going to happen - they usually occur every century - and by expanding our search into far-away galaxies we hope to see one every year."

Using the Hubble Space Telescope provides amazingly detailed pictures of distant galaxies. Images from Earth based telescopes would be blurred too much by the atmosphere to allow individual stars to be detected.

There is stiff competition from astronomers all over the world to use Hubble and Dr Smartt says he feels incredibly privileged to be able to use it.

Hubble was originally designed in the 1970s and launched in 1990, with an estimated lifespan of 20 years. It is the first astronomical mission of any kind that is specifically designed for routine servicing by spacewalking astronauts.

However, due to safety concerns following the Columbia disaster, NASA has recently taken the decision to stop all manned missions to Hubble and the future of this great observatory is now uncertain.

"Hubble was designed to be visited periodically by astronauts who would perform repairs and install new equipment, but now NASA, having cancelled all manned missions, is looking at different options for extending Hubble's life. These include using robotic servicing. This has never been done before in space and therefore the chances of success are uncertain.

"Many astronauts are still keen to go on servicing missions to Hubble, despite the safety risks, but the issue is a balance between safety and cost. If NASA is going to continue with Hubble it will need to spend money on safety, which it would prefer to divert into manned missions to the Moon and Mars," said Dr Smartt.

The decision to halt manned servicing missions has been not been popular with the scientific community. Over the last few months a committee of esteemed US engineers and scientists reviewed NASA's decision to halt manned missions and recommended a rethink. Dr Smartt agreed with the panel's conclusions.

"I believe there is much more we can learn about the Universe and our place in it by keeping Hubble working rather than going to the Moon. Hubble has produced the deepest and sharpest images of our Universe in human history. Scientists and the public would both lose out if this fantastic observatory is not maintained," he said.

Originally from Belfast, Dr Smartt completed his primary and PhD degrees at Queen's before working in the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma in the Canaries. As well as being a lecturer, Dr Smartt holds a prestigious Advanced Fellowship from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.

For further information contact: Dr Stephen Smartt

On Thursday 20th May, Dr Alan Fitzsimmons and Professor Francis Keenan of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics welcomed a class of Primary 5 pupils from the Holy Family Primary School in Crossgar. The class was introduced to the fascinating world of astronomy, including a demonstration of how telescopes work, and an introduction to the planets. In addition, the class was told how to find the planet Venus in the evening time, just after sunset.

As the class was also visiting the Ulster Museum to see the dinosaur exhibit, they were told how the dinosaurs were wiped out over 60 million years ago by a large asteroid impact. Alan Fitzsimmons, who is leading United Kingdom efforts in tracking such 'Extinction Level Event' asteroids, showed the class some examples of small meteorites from his collection. With the help of Fergal the dinosaur (see picture) and a meteorite, the asteroid impact which killed the dinosaurs was re-created for the class, which they found most enjoyable.

Belfast astronomers are coordinating the most ambitious project on earth to look for planets outside our solar system.

SuperWASP - the wide-angle search for planets - is being inaugurated today (16 April) by a consortium of astronomers at an observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. The programme consists of a network of cameras located at key points around the world, which will accurately measure the brightness of 50 million stars every night.

Dr Don Pollacco of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Division at Queen's University, who built the ground-breaking prototype WASP camera in Belfast, is the principal investigator of the multinational project. The SuperWASP instrument, costing approximately £400,000, was later developed with funding from Queen's, the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council - the UK's strategic science investment agency - and the Open University.

A critical component of SuperWASP - its CCD cameras which can operate in conditions of very low light - were manufactured by Andor Technology in Belfast, one of the earliest Queen's University spin-out companies.

The instrument, which is now entering its operational phase, will eventually be capable of running under robotic control. It is housed in a customised building at Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, and is operated by the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics.

"While the construction and initial commissioning phases of the facility have taken only nine months, SuperWASP represents the culmination of many years work from astronomers within the WASP consortium," said Dr Pollacco.

"SuperWASP has a novel optical design comprising up to eight scientific cameras, each resembling in operation a household digital camera, and collectively attached to a conventional telescope mount. Its field of view is some 2,000 times greater than a conventional astronomical telescope.

"Data from SuperWASP will lead to exciting progress in many areas of astronomy, ranging from the discovery of planets around nearby stars to the early detection of other classes of variable objects such as supernovae in distant galaxies," Dr Pollacco went on.

"In autumn last year, the first test data showed the instrument's performance to exceed initial expectations.

"Only about 100 extra-solar planets are currently known, and many questions about their formation and evolution remain unanswered due to the lack of observational data. This situation is expected to improve dramatically as SuperWASP produces scientific results.

"SuperWASP is the most ambitious project of its kind anywhere in the world. Its extremely wide field of view, combined with its ability to measure brightness very precisely, allows it to view large areas of the sky and accurately monitor the brightness of hundreds of thousands of stars.

"One nights' observing with SuperWASP will generate a vast amount of data, up to 60 GB - about the size of a typical modern computer hard disk. This data is then processed using sophisticated software and stored in a public database hosted by the Leicester Database and Archive Service of the University of Leicester."

Notes:
The members of the consortium are Queen's University Belfast, University of Cambridge, University of Keele, University of Leicester, Open University, University of St Andrews, the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics, and the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes in La Palma.
Pictures of the SuperWASP facility and some of its astronomical first-light images are available at http://www.superwasp.org/firstlight.html.

Astronomers at Queen's University Belfast report that one of the largest ever explosions on the Sun has resulted in the release of billions of tonnes of super-hot gas, which appears to be heading directly toward the Earth. The gas may result in communication blackouts, and cause temporary disruptions in power systems.

There is also a real possibility of the Northern Lights (called the aurora), that is normally a polar phenomena, being observed throughout the south of the UK, including Northern Ireland, over the next few nights.

The Belfast astronomers have been watching these sunspots develop over the past week. James McAteer, a researcher with the solar group in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division in the Queen's University School of Mathematics and Physics, drew the phenomenon to the attention of his supervisors, Professor Francis Keenan and Dr Mihalis Mathioudakis.

Mr McAteer said: " Last week, two large groups of sunspots appeared on the Sun. These developed into two of the largest and most complex regions ever recorded - over 100 times the size of the Earth. A solar flare last Wednesday resulted in some communications problems last weekend in the UK. However, this new solar flare (at 11:18 UT today) is up to six times larger. Also, as the sunspots are now on the central meridian of the Sun, the resulting explosion (called a Coronal Mass Ejection) is much more likely to be directed towards the Earth."

Queen's University Belfast is one of only three institutions worldwide with designated Chief Observers status in the Max Millennium program. Astronomers in Belfast send out daily e-mails to hundreds of solar telescopes and astronomers predicting solar activity. Professor Keenan added: "These dynamic pair of sunspot regions (designated NOAA 0484 and 0486) are expected to produce more high level activity as they pass across the Sun's surface over the next week."

For further details see
http://beauty.nascom.nasa.gov/arm/latest/
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime-images.html
http://www.spaceweather.com
http://solar.physics.montana.edu/max_millennium/

Construction has now started in La Palma on the first of three new cameras designed to look for planets outside our own solar system. To date about a hundred of these planets have been found by teams of scientists from around the world using various techniques, but the ambitious new WASP project hopes to find over a thousand new planets similar to Jupiter!

WASP, the wide-angle search for planets, will be formed of a network of at least three cameras, which will accurately measure the brightness of a million stars every minute. Astronomers will look for variations in the brightness of stars, which can indicate a planet passing in front of the star. The easiest sorts of planets to see are large Jupiter-sized objects, close to the star they orbit, known as 'hot Jupiters'. They also hope to detect variations due to asteroids passing near stars and giant explosions known as novae or supernovae.

Unusually, much of the equipment being used in WASP is similar to that used by amateur astronomers, but of research quality and used in a novel way. It is also innovative in its operation, as the system requires little supervision, Don Pollacco of Queens University Belfast explains: "Each camera in WASP is designed to run under robotic control with minimal human interaction."

Pete Wheatley, University of Leicester adds: "The first camera will generate 30 Gigabytes of data per night (equivalent to roughly 40 CDs!) and the entire network, once completed, should produce 16,000 Gigabytes a year, giving us a colossal processing task."

Planning permission for the work on La Palma was given earlier this month and clearing of the site started last week. Installation should start early June 2003 and WASP should see first light in the summer of 2003. La Palma is a premier site for astronomy, in the Canary Islands.

The WASP consortium consists of astronomers from: Queens University Belfast, the Universities of Cambridge, Keele, Leicester, St Andrews, the Open University, the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (La Palma) and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Tenerife).

WASP is funded by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and Queens University Belfast.

PPARC press release

Professor Francis Keenan, Head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics, has been awarded a prestigious William Penney Research Fellowship from the 1st October 2003.

The Fellowship, worth over £300,000, is for Professor Keenan to undertake research on the link between plasmas found in the laboratory and in astrophysics.

Rachel Street, a postdoctoral researcher within the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics, has been awarded a prestigious Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC). Competition for the Fellowships is extremely fierce, with over 240 applicants for only 13 awards. As the Fellowships are open to all nationalities, applicants must be performing world-leading research to be even considered for an award.

Rachel's Fellowship, which is for a 3-year period, is to work on data from the new SuperWASP robotic astronomical camera. This instrument, funded primarily by a £200,000 award from QUB, plus a £105,000 grant from PPARC, will be used to search for planets orbiting stars other than the Sun (the so-called extra-solar planets). SuperWASP is currently being constructed at QUB, and will be transported to La Palma in the Canary Islands during April/May 2003. It will begin observations shortly after arrival, and will be fully functional by the late summer. Once operational, SuperWASP is expected to dominate world efforts in this research field.

Professor Francis Keenan, Head of the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics, has recently been awarded funds totalling 252,740 pounds from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) for research on nuclear fusion.

In nuclear fusion, isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium are fused at very high temperatures into helium, with the production of virtually unlimited amounts of energy. This extremely hot fusion plasma must be contained by magnetic fields, rather than material walls. The ideal confinement geometry is doughnut-shaped, and is called a tokamak.

The temperatures and densities found in tokamak plasmas are very similar to those found in some astronomical sources, such as the solar corona, which may be observed during total solar eclipses as a halo of white light surrounding the Sun. This similarity means that research in an esoteric area such as astronomy is of practical use, and can immediately benefit the development of, for example, new sources of energy.

Staff in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division have been studying the solar corona for many years using NASA and European Space Agency satellites, plus other facilities. This experience in understanding the solar corona has led to a long-standing and highly successful collaboration with the UKAEA Culham Science Centre in Oxfordshire, which is a world leader in tokamak fusion experiments.

The research programme funded by the UKAEA will be undertaken at the Culham Science Centre, and will involve the analysis of data from the many tokamak devices situated at this site, including the Joint European Torus (JET), the world's largest tokamak. In particular, the work will employ spectral diagnostics developed for solar physics research to understand what is going on in the tokamak plasmas.

The collaborative research between Queen's and the UKAEA has contributed to enormous advances in the performance and understanding of tokamaks in the past decade. These studies are providing the vital data needed to build a much larger machine, ITER, that will be able to produce practical fusion burning plasmas in the second decade of this millennium.

Hence by studying the stars, staff at Queen's University are at the forefront of the development of a new, clean and safe source of energy for the twenty-first century.

A PhD student from the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics was awarded funding to spend the 3-month period July - September 2002 working at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Maryland) on observations of the Sun made with the Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). James McAteer, a 3rd-year student under the supervision of Dr. Mihalis Mathioudakis and Prof. Francis Keenan, carried out solar flare research with Dr. Peter Gallagher and Dr. Brian Dennis, both members of the RHESSI team at NASA.

RHESSI is a NASA Small Explorer mission launched in February 2002. Its primary objective is to explore the basic physics of particle acceleration and explosive energy release in solar flares. During a flare, gas is heated to 10 to 20 million degrees. Unable to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, the X-rays from the flare can only be detected from space. Researchers believe that much of the energy released during a flare is used to accelerate electrons, protons and other ions, to very high energies. The new approach of the RHESSI mission is to combine, for the first time, high-resolution imaging in hard X-rays and gamma rays with high-resolution spectroscopy, so that a detailed energy spectrum can be obtained at each point of the image.

The RHESSI data analysed by James was combined with high time resolution flare observations, obtained at the Big Bear Solar Observatory (California) by James, Dr. Gallagher, and Dr. David Williams in August 2002. A new instrument, the Rapid Dual Imager (RDI), developed by the solar physics group at QUB and funded by a Royal Society grant to Dr. Mathioudakis, was used at Big Bear for the solar flare observations. RDI is an upgrade of the highly successful Solar Eclipse Coronal Imaging System (SECIS), used previously by QUB personnel to observe two total solar eclipses, namely those in Bulgaria in August 1999 and Zambia in June 2001. However, RDI is capable of imaging at 80 frames per second simultaneously onto two detectors for a 2-hour period. By contrast, SECIS was limited to a 3-minute observation window. At 80 frames per second, RDI can be used with any telescope to detect rapid events in the solar chromosphere, which are believed to occur during flares.

James and Dr. Gallagher also carried out research in the area of predicting the occurrence and strength of solar flares, by studying the magnetic structure and fractal dimension of their sources. This work is part of NASA's 'Living With A Star' Program, which aims to study how solar events effect life on Earth.

Staff in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science (APS) Research Division in the School of Mathematics and Physics have recently been awarded external research grant funding which totals over £1 million.

This includes the largest grant ever awarded in Northern Ireland by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), for £545,000. The award will be used to support a range of research projects in observational astrophysics, including studies of the Sun and other stars, investigations of comets and asteroids, and the search for extra-solar planets using the SUPERWASP camera currently under construction at QUB.

Another PPARC grant for £114,000 will provide funding for QUB staff to travel to telescopes to obtain astronomical observations, and also to use SUPERWASP on the island of La Palma (Canary Islands) to search for extra-solar planets.

The SUPERWASP instrument is being funded primarily from an award from QUB of £200,000, and an earlier PPARC grant for £106,000. Professor Francis Keenan, Head of the APS Division, said "the QUB investment in SUPERWASP has been rewarded by our success in attracting large PPARC grants, and clearly illustrates that the APS Division can generate significant external grant income when provided with support from QUB".

PPARC has also awarded a grant of £157,000 to Professor Keenan to undertake a programme of studying the X-ray spectra of laboratory plasmas which have similar physical characteristics to those found in astronomy, and can hence provide insight into their astrophysical counterparts.

In addition, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has awarded 2 grants to Professor Keenan, for £194,000 and £116,000, for research on very high temperature laboratory plasmas.

A new centre, providing information on comets and asteroids which may one day collide with Earth, will be supported by Queen's University and W5 Discovery Centre in Belfast.

Announced on Tuesday by Lord Sainsbury, the new United Kingdom Near-Earth Object Information Centre (UKNEOIC) will be responsible for providing informative and factual information to the media, schools and the general public.

W5 will utilise its world-class experience in science education to provide both an exhibition at the W5 Centre and assist in the creation of teaching packs for schools and information packs for the public.

Astrophysicists led by Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons at Queens will be responsible for ensuring the accuracy and correctness of the UK-wide facility.

The last impact of a small asteroid occurred in 1908 in Siberia, devastating thousands of square kilometres. It is believed that an impact by a large asteroid or comet killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Dr. Fitzsimmons said there are a lot of misconceptions about the risk from comet and asteroid impact, which arise from many sources.

By offering clear, factual and unbiased information on both Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and the risk of impact, we hope to clarify what is an important issue, he added.

Dr. Sally Montgomery from W5 said "We are delighted to be part of this unique partnership with Queen's and the National Space Centre", and looked forward to providing information to the public and schools.

Overall management of the UKNEOIC will be from the National Space Centre in Leicester. Other institutions involved are the University of Leicester, Queen Mary College University of London, the Institute of Astronomy in Edinburgh and the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh.

A photocall with Dr. Montgomery and Dr. Fitzsimmons will take place at the W5 Discovery Centre between 2pm and 3pm on Friday 4th January. All journalists are welcome to attend.

For further information, contact Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons.

A Queen's astronomer has been at the heart of a major government initiative to protect the Earth from a possible asteroid collision.

Dr Alan Fitzsimmons, who is based in the School of Mathematics and Physics, has provided critical advice to the government on finding asteroids and comets that could hit the Earth.

The Minister for Science, Lord Sainsbury, has used a report by Dr. Fitzsimmons on how best to track and find Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), which are asteroids and comets that pass close to our planet, and may one day collide with it.

Dr Fitzsimmons studied how telescopes already built can be used to observe NEOs. He showed exactly how it is possible for the UK to support the current international effort to protect the Earth.

Dr. Fitzsimmons said "I found that several telescopes we operate could be used successfully for finding and tracking dangerous asteroids."

"Although not built for this purpose, our telescopes could track all visible NEOs and find over 200 new ones each year," he added.

Lord Sainsbury singled out UK telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. These will be tested by Dr. Fitzsimmons later this year to confirm they can perform as expected.

Astronomers in the APS Division have been awarded observing time on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas. The HET is one of the world's largest optical telescopes, with a primary mirror some 11 metres in diameter.

The project awarded time is part of a large-scale programme to study very faint (B > 15) hot (B-type) stars in the halo region of our Galaxy. These stars are part of a magnitude-limited sample of objects from the Palomar-Green (PG) Survey. Brighter stars in the PG Survey sample with B < 15 have already been observed with the 4.2 metre diameter William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, Canary Islands. However the larger aperture of the HET is required to study the fainter stars.

The overall aim of the programme is to determine the number density, distribution and origin of hot stars in the Galactic halo.

A team from the APS Division has been awarded funding of 284,000 pounds by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for a collaborative project with scientists at the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories in the United States.

The project involves running experiments on the Z Machine - the world's most powerful laboratory-based X-ray source - at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, to mimic the physical conditions found in exotic astrophysical sources such as quasars and neutron stars. Such objects are intense sources of X-ray radiation.

The APS team, led by Prof Francis Keenan, will work on the modelling and interpretation of the experimental data obtained from the Z Machine. This will help our understanding of the physical processes operating within strong astronomical X-ray sources, and hence provide important information on their origin and evolution.

A high precision camera, designed to discover planets in other solar systems, is to be designed and built at QUB.

The imaging camera will enable scientists to pinpoint planets orbiting other stars.

APS Division lecturer Don Pollacco, who will design and build the camera, explains how it will operate: 'It will look for dimming in the star brightness caused by the apparent passing of a planet in front of the star. The dimming effect is extremely small and that is why we have a thermo-electrically cooled detector which gives it high precision.'

As well as being robotically controlled, the camera will also be able to deal with vast quantities of information - in one night alone it will be able to collect up to 10 GBytes of data.

'At the moment this camera will discover more planets in a year than have already been discovered', said Dr Pollacco.

Most of the funding for the equipment has come from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), which has awarded a 105,000 pounds grant, while the Royal Society has contributed a further 10,000 pounds.

Based on a prototype which Dr Pollacco built last year using university finance, the camera, the first of its kind to be built at QUB, will be used as the first step in discovering Earth-like planets.

According to Dr Pollacco, mankind has barely started to discover planets. 'We know a lot about our own solar system, but very little about other solar systems. This camera will find other solar systems which have big planets in them like Jupiter, and also look for Earth-like planets.'

'Having detected any planets, satellites will be sent up over the next 10 years to observe them and monitor them for Earth-like systems.'

Astronomers in the Astrophysics and Planetary Science Research Division at Queen's University have recently been awarded a research grant of £525,000 by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC).

This grant, the largest ever awarded by PPARC for astronomy research in Northern Ireland, will be used to support numerous projects involving the use of telescopes at several major observatories around the world, including those in Australia, the Canary Islands, Hawaii and South Africa. The grant will also fund research programmes which employ observations from satellites, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton X-ray Observatory.

Astronomers at Queen's work on several topics of major astronomical importance. These include studies of the Sun and other stars, the observation of asteroids and comets (including Near-Earth Objects, the topic of a recent Government report), and the interstellar medium. Staff are also involved in the development of new astronomical instruments, to observe the Sun during total eclipses, and to search for planets orbiting other stars.

PPARC have also awarded Queen's a grant of £155,000, which will be used by staff to travel to telescopes to obtain astronomical observations. This grant is one of the largest awarded in the United Kingdom for such work.

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