Dr. Jennifer Gupta, the ICG/SEPNet/Ogden Physic Outreach Officer, was highly commended last night at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards Dinner, held at the Hilton Park Lane, London.

Dr. Jen Gupta at the AWA Awards

This success follows her shortlisting in the “Young Achievers” category which was announced last month. This AWA category recognises the talents of rising stars in the UK across all sectors. The winner was Tanya Datta, a store manager at Marks & Spencers in north London.

The moment when Jen’s achievements in making the shortlist were announced.

This was the 16th annual Asian Women of Achievement Awards, and this evening event, which brings all these wonderful women together to showcase their achievements, often in the face of great adversity, was incredibly inspirational.

Jen (just behind the podium on the left) with all the other shortlisted candidates, and presenter Riz Lateef.

An international team of scientists, including from the UK’s University of Portsmouth, today released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos.

The maps, created with one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail, and will improve our understanding of dark matter’s role in the formation of galaxies.

This is the first Dark Energy Survey map to trace the detailed distribution of dark matter across a large area of sky. The colour represents projected mass density. Yellow and red are regions with more dense matter. The dark matter maps conform to the current picture of mass distribution in the universe where large filaments of matter align with galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The clusters of galaxies are shown by the grey dots in the map — bigger dots represent larger clusters. This map covers three percent of the area of sky that DES will eventually document over its five-year mission.

Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow those working on the Dark Energy Survey to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.

Publication coincides with the start of the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, which includes many Dark Energy Survey talks and posters over two days, and is synchronised with a tranche of research papers publicly released on the arXiv.org e-Print server today.

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe, is invisible to even the most sensitive astronomical instruments because it does not emit or block light. But its effects can be seen using a technique called gravitational lensing – studying the distortion that occurs when the gravitational pull of dark matter bends light around distant galaxies. Understanding the role of dark matter is part of the research programme to quantify the role of dark energy, which is the ultimate goal of the survey.

David Bacon, at the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “Using the gravitational lensing technique, we can see the dark matter filling our Universe. We see it by how this invisible material bends and distorts light as it passes through. We can now make maps of the dark matter and see how it clumps together, providing an insight into the cosmic web of matter including clusters and the filamentary structure that joins them.”



The new maps were created using data captured by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera in Chile.

Dr Bacon said: “The camera is one of the most powerful cameras in the world, collecting data nearly ten times faster than previous machines. This allows us to stare deeper into space and see the effects of dark matter and dark energy with greater clarity. Ironically, although these dark entities make up 96 per cent of our universe, seeing them is hard and requires vast amounts of data.”

The researchers are two years into a five-year programme as part of their work on the Dark Energy Survey.

The dark matter maps released today cover only about three per cent of the area of sky the Dark Energy Survey team will document over its mission. As scientists expand their search, they’ll be able to better test current cosmological theories by comparing the amounts of dark and visible matter.

Those theories suggest that since there is much more dark matter in the universe than visible matter, galaxies will form where there are large concentrations of dark matter. So far, the DES analysis backs this up. The maps show large filaments of matter, along which visible galaxies and galaxy clusters lie, and cosmic voids with very few galaxies.

Follow-up studies of some of the enormous filaments and voids, and the enormous volume of data, collected throughout the survey will reveal more about this interplay of mass and light.

The Dark Energy Survey analysis is available here.

Originally posted by the University Press Office

Third-year Applied Physics student Joakim Carlsen wins the prize for best poster and project, entitled ‘Detecting Massive Galaxies at High Redshift Using the Dark Energy Survey’ carried out at the ICG supervised by Dr Daniel Thomas. The project was a great team effort with ICG researchers Xan Morice-Atkinson, Dr Diego Capozzi, and James Etherington contributing to the project. In his project, Joakim is looking for candidates of very massive galaxies in the early universe around redshifts 4-6 in the Dark Energy Survey data. This search for ‘a needle in the haystack’ led to a few very promising objects that will now need to be confirmed through follow-up spectroscopy. If true, the sheer presence of massive galaxies in the early universe would be challenging our current understanding of galaxy formation.

On Wednesday 28th January 2015, over 100 primary school children from Portsmouth and the surrounding areas attended the second annual Stargazing for Schools event at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. The event was organised by the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation and HMS Warrior 1860, with support from the University of Southampton and Action Stations. Over the course of the day, the children attended six workshops on board HMS Warrior and at Action Stations themed around ‘Navigation through Space and Time’, exploring the link between stargazing and sailing, and learning about astronomy and navigation along the way.

Dr Jen Gupta, Dr Edd Edmondson and Dr Coleman Krawczyk from the ICG teamed up with University of Southampton PhD students Sam Connolly and Chris Frohmaier to run three workshops, looking at the size of planets in the solar system using play-doh, explaining how telescopes work with glasses of water and magnifying glasses, and investigating how astronomers tell what stars are made of using their spectrum. Attendees also watched a show in the University of Portsmouth’s Astrodome presented by Dr Sadie Jones from the University of Southampton and Applied Physics undergraduate Thomas Hodge. On the navigation side, the children explored both historic and modern navigation techniques with the learning teams from HMS Warrior 1860 and Action Stations. The event built on the success of the first Stargazing for Schools event in 2014, where the photographs below were taken.

Investigating spectra at last year’s Stargazing for Schools 2014. Credit: Martin Lewis

Play-doh planets at last year’s Stargazing for Schools 2014. Credit: Martin Lewis

Stargazing for Schools is part of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation’s schools programme that includes events and activities for all ages. For more information, see our Schools Outreach page. Our public Stargazing Live event is planned for Tuesday 24th March 2015, to tie-in with the BBC Stargazing Live TV programme, more details will be available soon.