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UCL ASTROPHYSICS GROUP
***SEMINARS*** Monday 16th November - Speaker: Ciska Kemper (Jodrell Bank/Manchester) Title: The life cycle of dust in galaxies
***NEWS*** --Guardian weekly science podcast (5 October 2009)-- Prof. Ofer Lahav (Head of UCL Astrophysics) was interviewed on
dark matter and dark energy, and on UCL's contribution to the 'Dark Energy Survey' --Astronomy meets art-- Katie Paterson visits the UoL Observatory at Mill Hill to talk to Prof. Ofer Lahav about the mysteries of the universe. Her latest work is a map of ‘dead stars’ 27,000 of them, or all that have so far been observed and recorded. Katie Paterson’s work was featured in the Altermodern exhibition at Tate Britain. To hear the interview see http://www.tate.org.uk/tateshots/episode.jsp?item=18622 --Herschel Planck-- At 2:12 p.m. (UK time) on Thursday May 14th, the European Space Agency has successfully launched in space one of its most valuable scientific payloads ever. An Ariane V launcher blasted off from Kourou on the Atlantic coast of French Guyana. The two satellites are now en route to the L2 Earth-Sun Lagrangian point, one million miles away from the Earth, where they will orbit the sun and start their scientific mission. The Herschel Space Observatory, named after the astronomer William Herschel,
has a 3.5m diameter telescope, the largest ever sent into space and the first
mirror made of silicon carbide to be used by a large space telescope. It will
have three scientific instruments on-board, for imaging and spectroscopy in the
far-infrared and submillimetre wavelength regions (55-670 microns), all cooled
to -269 Celsius, with more than 3000 litres of liquid helium needed to cool
them over its anticipated lifetime of 3 to 4 years. Herschel will carry out
searches for newly formed galaxies in the early Universe, as well as as
studying star formation in
our own and other galaxies.
The second satellite, called Planck after the physicist Max Planck, will use a
1.6m diameter telescope to obtain detailed maps of the primordial seeds of
matter in the early Universe. With detectors sensitive to 9 different
wavelength regions collecting electromagnetic radiation from far-infrared to
microwave wavelengths (~100 microns to 1 cm), the Planck satellite will map the
whole sky every six months by rotating on its axis while orbiting the sun
synchronously with Earth, gathering vast amounts of data on diffuse structures,
as well as on the large scale magnetic field in which our galaxy is enveloped.
It should detect with unprecedented sensitivity the primordial fluctuations of
matter in the early stages of the Universe allowing a test of many cosmological
models, tracing the possible gravitational imprint of the Big Bang on the
distribution of matter in the Universe.
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Astrophysics Views
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UCL Department of Physics & Astronomy - Astrophysics Group - Gower Street - London - WC1E 6BT -
+44 (0)20 7679 3458
