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...

One mechanism that has been put forward as a generator of maser flares in massive star-forming regions is the impact of a shock of modest speed on a cloud with...

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”...

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 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...

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...

The Standard Model (SM) of Elementary Particles has been extremely successful in correctly predicting and describing the properties of elementary particles studied at experimental facilities all around the world. The...

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...

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...

Einstein’s theory of general relativity is both complex and beautiful; even after 100 years, there is still much it can reveal to us about the nature of gravity. It may...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Plasma is the fourth state of matter after the solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Almost all of the visible matter in the Universe is in the plasma state. This includes...

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...

In many areas of the solar atmosphere, including prominences, and many other astrophysical systems the majority of the fluid is neutral with only a small fraction being plasma. As with...

The last few years have seen many exciting developments in time-domain astronomy. In particular, thanks to modern surveys that monitor large areas of the night sky on a regular basis,...

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...

Understanding the nature of the standard model Higgs boson is still an open problem. An appealing possibility is that the Higgs boson be a composite particle resulting from a novel...

The Thirring Model describes relativistic fermions moving in a two-dimensional plane and interacting via a contact term between covariantly conserved currents. The physical system it most resembles is that of...

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...

Galaxy clusters are the most massive gravitationally bound systems and encode unique information on the composition of our Universe. They comprise of a massive dark matter halo and up to...

The vast majority of hadrons are resonances, seen experimentally through decays into a multitude of other hadrons in various angular distributions and corresponding to pole singularities in scattering amplitudes. Resonances...

The formation and life-cycle of giant molecular clouds is a crucial part of understanding both the evolution of galaxies and the varying environments in which the star formation process occurs....

In recent years the detection of a large variety of structures in protoplanetary systems (once believed to be featureless), the detection of a high number of exoplanets with properties much...

Planets form within flattened discs of material around young stars. These young stars themselves form in clustered groups of up to hundreds of thousands of stars. Most planet-forming discs therefore...

The fact that young planets migrate as a result of interaction with their natal disc is well established theoretically and is widely applied when explaining the orbital properties of exoplanets....

Creating accurate models of our Universe is one of the great quests of humankind, going back to the ancient Greeks, through to Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein. In recent years, huge...

Cosmological models in which the dark matter consists of cold elementary particles predict that the population of dark matter haloes in the Universe should extend to masses comparable to the...

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...

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...

Electromagnetic waves interact strongly with charged particles in the Earth’s inner magnetosphere. It is important to be able to model the evolution of these particles, since we rely on the...

An important aspect of understanding the formation of bulges of galaxies, including that of the Milky Way, is understanding their metallicity trends. The most notable feature of the metallicity distribution...

Gravitation in our Universe is best-described by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity. Cosmological simulations typically use a Newtonian approximation for the gravitational field however, which is far simpler to solve,...