A steeply-inclined trajectory for the Chicxulub impact

Simulations performed on the DiRAC High Performance Computing Facility have revealed the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs struck Earth at the ‘deadliest possible’ angle. The simulations reveal that the asteroid...

‘Fast and furious’ planets around tiny stars

New astronomy research from the University of Central Lancashire suggests giant planets could form around small stars much faster than previously thought. As published in the “Astronomy and Astrophysics Journal”...

Computational spectroscopy of exoplanets

Since the first discovery of a planet orbiting a distant star 25 years ago (Nobel Prize in Physics 2019) over 4000 of exoplanets have been discovered. Now we want to...

COSMOS: Studying cosmic strings

COSMOS consortium members (dp002) have made good progress over the past year using DiRAC HPC Facilities, particularly implementing adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) techniques for the study of extreme gravity in...

Deep inelastic structure of the proton

Hadron structure functions are ubiquitous in the description of leptonic interactions with hadrons, encoding: elastic form factors, inclusive electro- (and photo-) production of resonances, diffractive processes and Regge phenomena, and...

Dust destruction in supernova remnants

It is well established that (sub-)micrometre sized dust grains can form in over-dense gas clumps in the expanding ejecta of supernovae remnants. However, highly energetic shock waves occur in the...

Electron acceleration and transport in turbulence

Highly energetic electrons are present in many different astrophysical systems, from solar flares and supernovae to planetary magnetospheres and the intra-cluster medium. Plasma turbulence is ubiquitous in these systems, and...

Exploring Jupiter’s Magnetic Field

The Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter in 2016 and has since been taking measurements of the gas giant’s magnetic and gravitational fields. Many interesting features on Jupiter’s surface, such as the...

Extreme Gravity and Gravitational Waves

When two black holes inspiral and merge, they emit gravitational waves that have famously been detected for the first time by LIGO in 2015 [1]. These gravitational waves carry energy...

Extreme QCD: Quantifying the QCD Phase Diagram ’19

The FASTSUM collaboration uses DiRAC supercomputers to simulate the interaction of quarks, the fundamental particles which make up protons, neutrons and other hadrons. The force which holds quarks together inside...

Gaseous Dynamical Friction in the Early Universe

Dynamical friction is the process by which a massive perturber, moving through some background medium, gravitationally interacts with that medium, producing a net retarding force to its motion. When the...

How primordial magnetic fields shrink galaxies

Little is known about how primordial magnetic fields are generated nor about their initial configurations. Their exact primordial normalization, coherence length and spectral index are undetermined but they are widely...

How stars form in the smallest galaxies

It has been a long-standing puzzle how the smallest galaxies in the Universe have managed to continuously form stars at such a remarkably low rate – tiny galaxies like Leo...

HPQCD: B meson oscillations

B meson oscillations Watching the oscillations of two coupled pendulums (for example, attached to the same not-too-rigid support) provides insights into simple but rather counter-intuitive physics. Set one pendulum oscillating...

Impact of Reionization on the Intergalactic Medium

The latest measurements of CMB electron scattering optical depth reported by the Planck satellite significantly reduces the allowed range of HI reionization models, pointing towards a later ending and/or less...

New LIGO-Virgo gravitational waves

The third LIGO-Virgo observing run (O3) began in April 2019, and has since announced three gravitational-wave observations – the binary-neutron star merger GW190425, the binary-black-hole merger GW190412, and most recently...

Stellar Hydrodynamics, Evolution and Nucleosynthesis

The stellar hydrodynamic group of Prof Raphael Hirschi at Keele University and their international collaborators computed a series of 3D hydrodynamical simulations of stellar convection during carbon burning (see figure...

Tidal disruption by supermassive black holes

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole (SMBH). By “too close” we mean that the tidal field resulting from the black...

UKMHD: How is the solar corona heated?

The only viable mechanism to heat the outer solar atmosphere must involve the magnetic field. Two main approaches have been adopted. One is to model the heating along individual magnetic...