The Astronomy and Astrophysics group at Warwick is one of the newest additions to the Department of Physics, beginning life in September 2003 with the appointment of Prof Tom Marsh. We are interested in stars and planets, how they live and how they die, and the exotic physical processes that they allow us to explore. We are an observational group and make use of a wide range of ground-based telescopes, such as ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the Isaac Newton Group of telescopes (ING) in the Canary Islands, as well as space telescopes such as NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The objects we study are dynamic and can change within minutes, seconds and even milli-seconds. We specialise in the high-speed data acquisition and analysis techniques needed to track them. Members of the group have contributed to the development and exploitation of the ULTRACAM high-speed photometer, and the Wide Angle Search for Planets project (WASP).

News

13 November 2009: Warwick astronomers discover two white dwarfs with oxygen-rich atmospheres. These unusual abundances imply that the two stellar remnants most likely descend from relatively massive progenitors that just failed to collapse into neutron stars. Read the Warwick press release and the article in Science (or the open-access copy on arXiv).

29 October 2009: The most distant object in the Universe: The discovery of a gamma-ray burst from an era when the Universe was only 600 million years old has been reported in Nature today. This discovery dramatically increases the record for the most distant object from a redshift of z=6.96 to z=8.2. For more information see the Nature video.

27 August 2009: Reported in Nature this week; the WASP project discovers a planet that shouldn't exist! The planet is ten times heavier than Jupiter, but orbits its star in less than one Earth day. Strong tides should have caused the planet to spiral into its parent star. For more information please see the Warwick press release and Nature's editor's summary.

10 March 2009: Warwick undergraduate finds evidence for a lost population of planets. In a paper accepted for publication in the journal MNRAS, Tim Davis reports results from his final-year undergraduate research project suggesting that a large population of planets orbiting close to their parent stars have been evaporated to destruction by intense stellar X-ray emission. The work was supervised by Peter Wheatley of the Astronomy and Astrophysics group, and is the article is available as a preprint or directly from the journal.

19 September 2008: Warwick astronomers lift the mystery of a unique optical transient. An unusual optical transient was identified during the the Hubble Space Telescope Cluster Supernova Survey brightened by a factor 120, and faded again into oblivion, over the course of ~200 days, but its nature remained completely unknown. Warwick astronomy staff have shown that the spectrum of this transient is consistent with a cool, carbon rich photosphere at a redshift of ~0.14. In addition, they analysed XMM-Newton X-ray observations of the transient, showing that it was not only bright at optical wavelengths, but also a luminous high-energy source. The extragalctic nature of this event suggests that it may be a so far unknown type of supernova. For more information read the paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters or the news item in Nature.

10 April 2008: Hubble pinpoints the brightest explosion. Researchers working at the University of Warwick, with colleagues in Leicester University, ESA and NASA, have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to pin point what remains of what was the brightest naked-eye object ever seen from Earth. It is 7.5 billion light-years away -- halfway back to the big bang, and was once as bright as 10 million galaxies. More information and images from NASA.

More news...

Very Large Telescope (VLT), ESO, Chile

Hubble Space Telescope (NASA/ESA)