Astronomy Unit

The School of Physics and Astronomy is pleased to announced that it has been awarded Juno Practitioner status by the Institute of Physics. The aim of Juno is to recognise and reward departments that can demonstrate they have taken action to address the under-representation of women in university physics and to encourage better practice for both women and men.

Work carried out by planetary scientists in the Astronomy Unit has been chosen as one of the Top 10 Science Highlights of NASA's Cassini mission in 2012.  Nick Attree, Carl Murray, Nick Cooper and Gareth Williams reported their work on trails, or "mini-jets", in Saturn's peculiar F ring in April 2012.  The image was taken with Cassini's narrow angle camera just after the spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn on 1 July 2004.

A nine-gigapixel zoomable image of 84 million stars has been created by an international team of astronomers using the UK-built VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The image is so large that, if printed with the resolution of the average book, it would be nine metres long and seven metres tall. The huge dataset contains ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

PASADENA, Calif. - Scientists working with images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have discovered strange half-mile-sized (kilometer-sized) objects punching through parts of Saturn's F ring, leaving glittering trails behind them.