National Astronomy Meeting - NAM2008 at Queen's University Belfast

National Astronomy Meeting - NAM2008 at Queen's University Belfast

Despite the gloom cast by the current STFC funding crisis, UK astronomers nevertheless convened recently in Belfast for NAM 2008, and still found time to discuss a wide range of papers and research, which I've copied here from the NAM website...

• World's largest digital camera to change view of the Universe - 4 April 2008
• Witnessing the formation of distant galaxies - 4 April 2008
• Quasars quash star formation in Active Galactic Nuclei - 4 April 2008
• Science and art of Hubble Space Telescope on show at Queen's - 2 April 2008
• Astronomers find embryonic planet - 2 April 2008
• The source of the solar wind - 2 April 2008
• The sun's magnetic fountains - 2 April 2008
• "Focused" solar explosions get hotter - 2 April 2008
• Stereo snaps first footage of a solar tsunami - 2 April 2008
• Flames leave astronomers in a spin - 2 April 2008
• The evolution of venus: first too fast, then too slow - 2 April 2008
• Planet finder catches a comet - 2 April 2008
• Catching a shooting star on Mars - 2 April 2008
• Chance of finding earthlike planets on the 'RISE' as UK astronomers deploy new camera - 2 April 2008
• Do dwarf galaxies favour Mond over dark matter? - 2 April 2008
• Revealing the multi-wavelength sky with AstroGrid - 1 April 2008
• Newborn Brown Dwarfs Stir up the Neighbourhood - 1 April 2008
• The (Super)Wasp factory finds 10 new planets in the last 6 months - 1 April 2008
• GCSE astronomy: A rising star for schoolchildren - 1 April 2008
• Magnetic substorms from ground and space - 1 April 2008
• Medical X-ray technique unveils the Sun's corona - 1 April 2008
• Two supernova factories found in the Milky Way - 1 April 2008
• Old galaxies stick together in the young universe - 1 April 2008
• Stars burst into life in the early universe - 1 April 2008

And here's a look at the last item on the list, which was in fact the first item on the NAM agenda...

New measurements from some of the most distant galaxies bolster the evidence that the strongest burst of star formation in the history of the Universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang. An international team of astronomers from the UK, France, Germany and the USA have found evidence for a dramatic surge in star birth in a newly discovered population of massive galaxies in the early Universe.

In his talk at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast on Tuesday 1 April, team member Dr Scott Chapman from the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge will present observations of five of these galaxies that are forming stars at a tremendous rate and have large reservoirs of gas that will power the star formation for hundreds of millions of years. Dr Chapman?s work is supported by a parallel study made by PhD student Caitlin Casey, who finds that the star formation in the new galaxies is distributed over a vast area. The galaxies are so distant that the light we detect from them has been travelling for more than 10 billion years.

This means that we see them as they were about a three billion years after the Big Bang. The recent discovery of a new type of extremely luminous galaxy in this epoch - one that is very faint in visible light, but much brighter at longer, radio wavelengths - is the key to the new results. A related type of galaxy was first found in 1997 (but not well understood until 2003) using a new and much more sensitive camera that detects radiation emitted at submillimetre wavelengths (longer than the wavelengths of visible light that we see with but somewhat shorter than radio waves). The camera, called `SCUBA' was attached to the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

On the subject of James Clerk Maxwell, the Royal Society has just published the following...

Volume 366 Number 1871 / May 28, 2008 of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

Theme Issue ‘James Clerk Maxwell 150 years on’ compiled by John S. Reid, Charles H.-T. Wang and J. Michael T. Thompson

image of Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank from here