Tag: University of Warwick (UK)

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The establishment of the The University of Warwick (UK) was given approval by the government in 1961 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965.

The idea for a university in Coventry was mooted shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War but it was a bold and imaginative partnership of the City and the County which brought the University into being on a 400-acre site jointly granted by the two authorities. Since then, the University has incorporated the former Coventry College of Education in 1978 and has extended its land holdings by the purchase of adjoining farm land.

The University initially admitted a small intake of graduate students in 1964 and took its first 450 undergraduates in October 1965. In October 2013, the student population was over 23,000 of which 9,775 are postgraduates. Around a third of the student body comes from overseas and over 120 countries are represented on the campus.

The University of Warwick is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The University was founded in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand higher education. The Warwick Business School was established in 1967, the Warwick Law School in 1968, Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) in 1980, and Warwick Medical School in 2000. Warwick incorporated Coventry College of Education in 1979 and Horticulture Research International in 2004.

Warwick is primarily based on a 290 hectares (720 acres) campus on the outskirts of Coventry, with a satellite campus in Wellesbourne and a central London base at the Shard. It is organised into three faculties — Arts, Science Engineering and Medicine, and Social Sciences — within which there are 32 departments. As of 2019, Warwick has around 26,531 full-time students and 2,492 academic and research staff. It had a consolidated income of £679.9 million in 2019/20, of which £131.7 million was from research grants and contracts. Warwick Arts Centre is a multi-venue arts complex in the university’s main campus and is the largest venue of its kind in the UK, which is not in London.

Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Warwick is a member of Association of Commonwealth Universities (UK), the Association of MBAs, EQUIS, the European University Association (EU), the Midlands Innovation group, the Russell Group (UK), Sutton 13. It is the only European member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a collaboration with New York University (US). The university has extensive commercial activities, including the University of Warwick Science Park and Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Warwick’s alumni and staff include winners of the Nobel Prize, Turing Award, Fields Medal, Richard W. Hamming Medal, Emmy Award, Grammy, and the Padma Vibhushan, and are fellows to the British Academy, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society. Alumni also include heads of state, government officials, leaders in intergovernmental organisations, and the current chief economist at the Bank of England. Researchers at Warwick have also made significant contributions such as the development of penicillin, music therapy, Washington Consensus, Second-wave feminism, computing standards, including ISO and ECMA, complexity theory, contract theory, and the International Political Economy as a field of study.

Twentieth century

The idea for a university in Warwickshire was first mooted shortly after World War II, although it was not founded for a further two decades. A partnership of the city and county councils ultimately provided the impetus for the university to be established on a 400-acre (1.6 km^2) site jointly granted by the two authorities. There was some discussion between local sponsors from both the city and county over whether it should be named after Coventry or Warwickshire. The name “University of Warwick” was adopted, even though Warwick, the county town, lies some 8 miles (13 km) to its southwest and Coventry’s city centre is only 3.5 miles (5.6 km) northeast of the campus. The establishment of the University of Warwick was given approval by the government in 1961 and it received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965. Since then, the university has incorporated the former Coventry College of Education in 1979 and has extended its land holdings by the continuing purchase of adjoining farm land. The university also benefited from a substantial donation from the family of John ‘Jack’ Martin, a Coventry businessman who had made a fortune from investment in Smirnoff vodka, and which enabled the construction of the Warwick Arts Centre.

The university initially admitted a small intake of graduate students in 1964 and took its first 450 undergraduates in October 1965. Since its establishment Warwick has expanded its grounds to 721 acres (2.9 km^2), with many modern buildings and academic facilities, lakes, and woodlands. In the 1960s and 1970s, Warwick had a reputation as a politically radical institution.

Under Vice-Chancellor Lord Butterworth, Warwick was the first UK university to adopt a business approach to higher education, develop close links with the business community and exploit the commercial value of its research. These tendencies were discussed by British historian and then-Warwick lecturer, E. P. Thompson, in his 1970 edited book Warwick University Ltd.

The Leicester Warwick Medical School, a new medical school based jointly at Warwick and University of Leicester (UK), opened in September 2000.

On the recommendation of Tony Blair, Bill Clinton chose Warwick as the venue for his last major foreign policy address as US President in December 2000. Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Advisor, explaining the decision in a press briefing on 7 December 2000, said that: “Warwick is one of Britain’s newest and finest research universities, singled out by Prime Minister Blair as a model both of academic excellence and independence from the government.”

Twenty-first century
The university was seen as a favoured institution of the Labour government during the New Labour years (1997 to 2010). It was academic partner for a number of flagship Government schemes including the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth and the NHS University (now defunct). Tony Blair described Warwick as “a beacon among British universities for its dynamism, quality and entrepreneurial zeal”. In a 2012 study by Virgin Media Business, Warwick was described as the most “digitally-savvy” UK university.

In February 2001, IBM donated a new S/390 computer and software worth £2 million to Warwick, to form part of a “Grid” enabling users to remotely share computing power. In April 2004 Warwick merged with the Wellesbourne and Kirton sites of Horticulture Research International. In July 2004 Warwick was the location for an important agreement between the Labour Party and the trade unions on Labour policy and trade union law, which has subsequently become known as the “Warwick Agreement”.

In June 2006 the new University Hospital Coventry opened, including a 102,000 sq ft (9,500 m^2) university clinical sciences building. Warwick Medical School was granted independent degree-awarding status in 2007, and the School’s partnership with the University of Leicester was dissolved in the same year. In February 2010, Lord Bhattacharyya, director and founder of the WMG unit at Warwick, made a £1 million donation to the university to support science grants and awards.

In February 2012 Warwick and Melbourne-based Monash University (AU) announced the formation of a strategic partnership, including the creation of 10 joint senior academic posts, new dual master’s and joint doctoral degrees, and co-ordination of research programmes. In March 2012 Warwick and Queen Mary, University of London announced the creation of a strategic partnership, including research collaboration, some joint teaching of English, history and computer science undergraduates, and the creation of eight joint post-doctoral research fellowships.

In April 2012 it was announced that Warwick would be the only European university participating in the Center for Urban Science and Progress, an applied science research institute to be based in New York consisting of an international consortium of universities and technology companies led by New York University and NYU Tandon School of Engineering (US). In August 2012, Warwick and five other Midlands-based universities — Aston University (UK), the University of Birmingham (UK), the University of Leicester (UK), Loughborough University (UK) and the University of Nottingham — formed the M5 Group, a regional bloc intended to maximise the member institutions’ research income and enable closer collaboration.

In September 2013 it was announced that a new National Automotive Innovation Centre would be built by WMG at Warwick’s main campus at a cost of £100 million, with £50 million to be contributed by Jaguar Land Rover and £30 million by Tata Motors.

In July 2014, the government announced that Warwick would be the host for the £1 billion Advanced Propulsion Centre, a joint venture between the Automotive Council and industry. The ten-year programme intends to position the university and the UK as leaders in the field of research into the next generation of automotive technology.

In September 2015, Warwick celebrated its 50th anniversary (1965–2015) and was designated “University of the Year” by The Times and The Sunday Times.

Research

In 2013/14 Warwick had a total research income of £90.1 million, of which £33.9 million was from Research Councils; £25.9 million was from central government, local authorities and public corporations; £12.7 million was from the European Union; £7.9 million was from UK industry and commerce; £5.2 million was from UK charitable bodies; £4.0 million was from overseas sources; and £0.5 million was from other sources.

In the 2014 UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), Warwick was again ranked 7th overall (as 2008) amongst multi-faculty institutions and was the top-ranked university in the Midlands. Some 87% of the University’s academic staff were rated as being in “world-leading” or “internationally excellent” departments with top research ratings of 4* or 3*.

Warwick is particularly strong in the areas of decision sciences research (economics, finance, management, mathematics and statistics). For instance, researchers of the Warwick Business School have won the highest prize of the prestigious European Case Clearing House (ECCH: the equivalent of the Oscars in terms of management research).

Warwick has established a number of stand-alone units to manage and extract commercial value from its research activities. The four most prominent examples of these units are University of Warwick Science Park; Warwick HRI; Warwick Ventures (the technology transfer arm of the University); and WMG.

From University of Warwick (UK) and From University of Exeter (UK) : “Star’s death will play a mean pinball with rhythmic planets”

From University of Exeter (UK)

and

6.11.21
Peter Thorley
Media Relations Manager (Warwick Medical School and Department of Physics) | Press & Media Relations | University of Warwick
peter.thorley@warwick.ac.uk
+44 (0) 7824 540863

Artist’s impression of the four planets of the HR 8799 system and its star (Credit: Mark Garlick/University of Warwick.

Astronomers from University of Warwick and University of Exeter modelling the future of unusual planetary system found a solar system of planets that will ‘pinball’ off one another.

Today, the system consists of four massive planets locked in a perfect rhythm.

Study shows that this perfect rhythm is likely to hold for 3 billion years – but the death of its sun will cause a chain reaction and set the interplanetary pinball game in motion.

Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future.

Astronomers have modelled how the change in gravitational forces in the system as a result of the star becoming a white dwarf will cause its planets to fly loose from their orbits and bounce off each other’s gravity, like balls bouncing off a bumper in a game of pinball.

In the process, they will knock nearby debris into their dying sun, offering scientists new insight into how the white dwarfs with polluted atmospheres that we see today originally evolved. The conclusions by astronomers from the University of Warwick and the University of Exeter are published in the MNRAS.

The HR 8799 system is 135 light years away and comprises a 30-40 million year-old A type star and four unusually massive planets, all over five times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting very close to each other. The system also contains two debris discs, inside the orbit of the innermost planet and another outside the outermost. Recent research has shown that the four planets are locked in a perfect rhythm that sees each one completing double the orbit of its neighbour: so for every orbit the furthest completes, the next closest completes two, the next completes four, while the closest completes eight.

The team from Warwick and Exeter decided to learn the ultimate fate of the system by creating a model that allowed them to play ‘planetary pinball’ with the planets, investigating what may cause the perfect rhythm to destabilise.

They determined that the resonance that locks the four planets is likely to hold firm for the next 3 billion years, despite the effects of Galactic tides and close flybys of other stars. However, it always breaks once the star enters the phase in which it becomes a red giant, when it will expand to several hundred times its current size and eject nearly half its mass, ending up as a white dwarf.

The planets will then start to pinball and become a highly chaotic system where their movements become very uncertain. Even changing a planet’s position by a centimetre at the start of the process can dramatically change the outcome.

Lead author Dr Dimitri Veras from the University of Warwick Department of Physics said: “The planets will gravitationally scatter off of one another. In one case, the innermost planet could be ejected from the system. Or, in another case, the third planet may be ejected. Or the second and fourth planets could switch positions. Any combination is possible just with little tweaks.

“They are so big and so close to each other the only thing that’s keeping them in this perfect rhythm right now is the locations of their orbits. All four are connected in this chain. As soon as the star loses mass their locations will deviate, then two of them will scatter off one another, causing a chain reaction amongst all four.”

Dr Veras was supported by an Ernest Rutherford Fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), part of UK Research and Innovation.

Regardless of the precise movements of the planets, one thing that the team is certain of is that the planets will move around enough to dislodge material from the system’s debris discs into the atmosphere of the star. It is this type of debris that astronomers are analysing today to discover the histories of other white dwarf systems.

Dr Veras adds: “These planets move around the white dwarf at different locations and can easily kick whatever debris is still there into the white dwarf, polluting it.

“The HR 8799 planetary system represents a foretaste of the polluted white dwarf systems that we see today. It’s a demonstration of the value of computing the fates of planetary systems, rather than just looking at their formation.”

Co-author Professor Sasha Hinkley of the University of Exeter said: “The HR 8799 system has been so iconic for exoplanetary science since its discovery nearly 13 years ago, and so it is fascinating to see into the future, and watch it evolve from a harmonious collection of planets into a chaotic scene.”

See the full article here.

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From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US)

The University of Exeter (UK) is a public research university in Exeter, Devon, South West England, United Kingdom. It was founded and received its royal charter in 1955, although its predecessor institutions, St Luke’s College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of Mines were established in 1838, 1855, 1863, and 1888 respectively. In post-nominals, the University of Exeter is abbreviated as Exon. (from the Latin Exoniensis), and is the suffix given to honorary and academic degrees from the university.

The university has four campuses: Streatham and St Luke’s (both of which are in Exeter); and Truro and Penryn (both of which are in Cornwall). The university is primarily located in the city of Exeter, Devon, where it is the principal higher education institution. Streatham is the largest campus containing many of the university’s administrative buildings. The Penryn campus is maintained in conjunction with Falmouth University (UK) under the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC) initiative. The Exeter Streatham Campus Library holds more than 1.2 million physical library resources, including historical journals and special collections. The annual income of the institution for 2017–18 was £415.5 million of which £76.1 million was from research grants and contracts, with an expenditure of £414.2 million.

Exeter is a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive UK universities and is also a member of Association of Commonwealth Universities (UK), the European University Association (EU), and the and an accredited institution of the Association of MBAs (AMBA).

The establishment of the The University of Warwick (UK) was given approval by the government in 1961 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965.

Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Warwick is a member of AACSB, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (UK), the Association of MBAs, EQUIS, the European University Association (EU), the Midlands Innovation group, the Russell Group (UK), Sutton 13 and. It is the only European member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a collaboration with New York University (US). The university has extensive commercial activities, including the University of Warwick Science Park and Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Twentieth century

The Leicester Warwick Medical School, a new medical school based jointly at Warwick and University of Leicester (UK), opened in September 2000.

Twenty-first century

The university was seen as a favoured institution of the Labour government during the New Labour years (1997 to 2010). It was academic partner for a number of flagship Government schemes including the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth and the NHS University (now defunct). Tony Blair described Warwick as “a beacon among British universities for its dynamism, quality and entrepreneurial zeal”. In a 2012 study by Virgin Media Business, Warwick was described as the most “digitally-savvy” UK university.

In September 2015, Warwick celebrated its 50th anniversary (1965–2015) and was designated “University of the Year” by The Times and The Sunday Times.

Research

From DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) : “First nanoscale look at a reaction that limits the efficiency of generating clean hydrogen fuel”

May 5, 2021 [Just now in social media.]
Glennda Chui

With a new suite of tools, scientists discovered exactly how tiny plate-like catalyst particles carry out a key step in that conversion – the evolution of oxygen in an electrocatalytic cell – in unprecedented detail.

An illustration shows bubbles of oxygen rising from the edges of a six-sided, plate-like catalyst particle, 200 times smaller than a red blood cell, as it carries out a reaction called OER that splits water molecules and generates oxygen gas. The small arm at left is from an atomic force microscope. It’s one of a suite of techniques that researchers from SLAC, Stanford, Berkeley Lab and the University of Warwick brought together to study this reaction – a key step in producing clean hydrogen fuel – in unprecedented detail. The concentric rings represent the scanning transmission X-ray microscope’s Fresnel zone plate used to image the process at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. Credit: CUBE3D Graphic.

Transitioning from fossil fuels to a clean hydrogen economy will require cheaper and more efficient ways to use renewable sources of electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen.

But a key step in that process, known as the oxygen evolution reaction or OER, has proven to be a bottleneck. Today it’s only about 75% efficient, and the precious metal catalysts used to accelerate the reaction, like platinum and iridium, are rare and expensive.

Now an international team led by scientists at Stanford University and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has developed a suite of advanced tools to break through this bottleneck and improve other energy-related processes, such as finding ways to make lithium-ion batteries charge faster. The research team described their work in Nature.

Working at Stanford University (US), SLAC, DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) (US) and University of Warwick (UK), they were able to zoom in on individual catalyst nanoparticles – shaped like tiny plates and about 200 times smaller than a red blood cell – and watch them accelerate the generation of oxygen inside custom-made electrochemical cells, including one that fits inside a drop of water.

They discovered that most of the catalytic activity took place on the edges of particles, and they were able to observe the chemical interactions between the particle and the surrounding electrolyte at a scale of billionths of a meter as they turned up the voltage to drive the reaction.

By combining their observations with prior computational work performed in collaboration with the SLAC SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis (US) at SLAC and Stanford, they were able to identify a single step in the reaction that limits how fast it can proceed.

“This suite of methods can tell us the where, what and why of how these electrocatalytic materials work under realistic operating conditions,” said Tyler Mefford, a staff scientist with Stanford and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC who led the research. “Now that we have outlined how to use this platform, the applications are extremely broad.”

Scaling up to a hydrogen economy

The idea of using electricity to break water down into oxygen and hydrogen dates back to 1800, when two British researchers discovered that they could use electric current generated by Alessandro Volta’s newly invented pile battery to power the reaction.

This process, called electrolysis, works much like a battery in reverse: Rather than generating electricity, it uses electrical current to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The reactions that generate hydrogen and oxygen gas take place on different electrodes using different precious metal catalysts.

Hydrogen gas is an important chemical feedstock for producing ammonia and refining steel and is increasingly being targeted as a clean fuel for heavy duty transportation and long-term energy storage. But more than 95% of the hydrogen produced today comes from natural gas via reactions that emit carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Generating hydrogen through water electrolysis driven by electricity from solar, wind, and other sustainable sources would significantly reduce carbon emissions in a number of important industries.

But to produce hydrogen fuel from water on a big enough scale to power a green economy scientists will have to make the other half of the water-splitting reaction – the one that generates oxygen – much more efficient, and find ways to make it work with catalysts based on much cheaper and more abundant metals than the ones used today.

“There aren’t enough precious metals in the world to power this reaction at the scale we need,” Mefford said, “and their cost is so high that the hydrogen they generate could never compete with hydrogen derived from fossil fuels.”

Improving the process will require a much better understanding of how water-splitting catalysts operate, in enough detail that scientists can predict what can be done to improve them. Until now, many of the best techniques for making these observations did not work in the liquid environment of an electrocatalytic reactor.

In this study, scientists found several ways to get around those limitations and get a sharper picture than ever before.

This animation combines images of a tiny, plate-like catalyst particle as it carries out a reaction that splits water and generates oxygen gas – part of a clean, sustainable process for producing hydrogen fuel. Made with an atomic force microscope in a Stanford lab, the images reveal how the catalyst changes shape and size as it operates – part of an in-depth study that showed the chemistry of the process is much different than previously assumed. Credit: Tyler Mefford and Andrew Akbashev/Stanford University.

New ways to spy on catalysts

The catalyst they chose to investigate was cobalt oxyhydroxide, which came in the form of flat, six-sided crystals called nanoplatelets. The edges were sharp and extremely thin, so it would be easy to distinguish whether a reaction was taking place on the edges or on the flat surface.

About a decade ago, Patrick Unwin’s research group at the University of Warwick had invented a novel technique for putting a miniature electrochemical cell inside a nanoscale droplet that protrudes from the tip of a pipette tube. When the droplet is brought into contact with a surface, the device images the topography of the surface and electronic and ionic currents with very high resolution.

For this study, Unwin’s team adapted this tiny device to work in the chemical environment of the oxygen evolution reaction. Postdoctoral researchers Minkyung Kang and Cameron Bentley moved it from place to place across the surface of a single catalyst particle as the reaction took place.

“Our technique allows us to zoom in to study extremely small regions of reactivity,” said Kang, who led out the experiments there. “We are looking at oxygen generation at a scale more than one hundred million times smaller than typical techniques.”

They discovered that, as is often that case for catalytic materials, only the edges were actively promoting the reaction, suggesting that future catalysts should maximize this sort of sharp, thin feature.

Meanwhile, Stanford and SIMES researcher Andrew Akbashev used electrochemical atomic force microscopy to determine and visualize exactly how the catalyst changed shape and size during operation, and discovered that the reactions that initially changed the catalyst to its active state were much different than had been previously assumed. Rather than protons leaving the catalyst to kick off the activation, hydroxide ions inserted themselves into the catalyst first, forming water inside the particle that made it swell up. As the activation process went on, this water and residual protons were driven back out.

In a third set of experiments, the team worked with David Shapiro and Young-Sang Yu at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source and with a Washington company, Hummingbird Scientific, to develop an electrochemical flow cell that could be integrated into a scanning transmission X-ray microscope.

DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory(US)Advanced Light Source.

This allowed them to map out the oxidation state of the working catalyst – a chemical state that’s associated with catalytic activity – in areas as small as about 50 nanometers in diameter.

“We can now start applying the techniques we developed in this work toward other electrochemical materials and processes,” Mefford said. “We would also like to study other energy-related reactions, like fast charging in battery electrodes, carbon dioxide reduction for carbon capture, and oxygen reduction, which allows us to use hydrogen in fuel cells.”

The Advanced Light Source is a DOE Office of Science user facility, and major funding for this research came from the DOE Office of Science, including Small Business Innovation Research awards to Hummingbird Scientific. Parts of the research were performed at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility.

See the full article here .

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SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (US) originally named Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and located in Menlo Park, California. It is the site of the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a 3.2 kilometer (2-mile) linear accelerator constructed in 1966 and shut down in the 2000s, which could accelerate electrons to energies of 50 GeV.

Today SLAC research centers on a broad program in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using X-rays from synchrotron radiation and a free-electron laser as well as experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics, astroparticle physics, and cosmology.

Founded in 1962 as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, the facility is located on 172 hectares (426 acres) of Stanford University-owned land on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California—just west of the University’s main campus. The main accelerator is 3.2 kilometers (2 mi) long—the longest linear accelerator in the world—and has been operational since 1966.

Research at SLAC has produced three Nobel Prizes in Physics

1976: The charm quark—see J/ψ meson
1990: Quark structure inside protons and neutrons
1995: The tau lepton

SLAC’s meeting facilities also provided a venue for the Homebrew Computer Club and other pioneers of the home computer revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In 1984 the laboratory was named an ASME National Historic Engineering Landmark and an IEEE Milestone.

SLAC developed and, in December 1991, began hosting the first World Wide Web server outside of Europe.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, the Stanford Linear Collider (SLC) investigated the properties of the Z boson using the Stanford Large Detector.

As of 2005, SLAC employed over 1,000 people, some 150 of whom were physicists with doctorate degrees, and served over 3,000 visiting researchers yearly, operating particle accelerators for high-energy physics and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL) for synchrotron light radiation research, which was “indispensable” in the research leading to the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Stanford Professor Roger D. Kornberg.

In October 2008, the Department of Energy announced that the center’s name would be changed to SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The reasons given include a better representation of the new direction of the lab and the ability to trademark the laboratory’s name. Stanford University had legally opposed the Department of Energy’s attempt to trademark “Stanford Linear Accelerator Center”.

In March 2009, it was announced that the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was to receive $68.3 million in Recovery Act Funding to be disbursed by Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

In October 2016, Bits and Watts launched as a collaboration between SLAC and Stanford University to design “better, greener electric grids”. SLAC later pulled out over concerns about an industry partner, the state-owned Chinese electric utility.

Accelerator

The main accelerator was an RF linear accelerator that accelerated electrons and positrons up to 50 GeV. At 3.2 km (2.0 mi) long, the accelerator was the longest linear accelerator in the world, and was claimed to be “the world’s most straight object.” until 2017 when the European x-ray free electron laser opened. The main accelerator is buried 9 m (30 ft) below ground and passes underneath Interstate Highway 280. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline, was the longest building in the United States until the LIGO project’s twin interferometers were completed in 1999. It is easily distinguishable from the air and is marked as a visual waypoint on aeronautical charts.

A portion of the original linear accelerator is now part of the Linac Coherent Light Source [below].

Stanford Linear Collider

The Stanford Linear Collider was a linear accelerator that collided electrons and positrons at SLAC. The center of mass energy was about 90 GeV, equal to the mass of the Z boson, which the accelerator was designed to study. Grad student Barrett D. Milliken discovered the first Z event on 12 April 1989 while poring over the previous day’s computer data from the Mark II detector. The bulk of the data was collected by the SLAC Large Detector, which came online in 1991. Although largely overshadowed by the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN, which began running in 1989, the highly polarized electron beam at SLC (close to 80%) made certain unique measurements possible, such as parity violation in Z Boson-b quark coupling.

European Organization for Nuclear Research [Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire](CH) LEP Collider

Presently no beam enters the south and north arcs in the machine, which leads to the Final Focus, therefore this section is mothballed to run beam into the PEP2 section from the beam switchyard.

The SLAC Large Detector (SLD) was the main detector for the Stanford Linear Collider. It was designed primarily to detect Z bosons produced by the accelerator’s electron-positron collisions. Built in 1991, the SLD operated from 1992 to 1998.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)Large Detector

**PEP**

PEP (Positron-Electron Project) began operation in 1980, with center-of-mass energies up to 29 GeV. At its apex, PEP had five large particle detectors in operation, as well as a sixth smaller detector. About 300 researchers made used of PEP. PEP stopped operating in 1990, and PEP-II began construction in 1994.

**PEP-II**

From 1999 to 2008, the main purpose of the linear accelerator was to inject electrons and positrons into the PEP-II accelerator, an electron-positron collider with a pair of storage rings 2.2 km (1.4 mi) in circumference. PEP-II was host to the BaBar experiment, one of the so-called B-Factory experiments studying charge-parity symmetry.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) BaBar

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/SSRL

Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

SLAC plays a primary role in the mission and operation of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in August 2008. The principal scientific objectives of this mission are:

To understand the mechanisms of particle acceleration in AGNs, pulsars, and SNRs.
To resolve the gamma-ray sky: unidentified sources and diffuse emission.
To determine the high-energy behavior of gamma-ray bursts and transients.
To probe dark matter and fundamental physics.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Large Area Telescope

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US)/Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope.

KIPAC

The Stanford PULSE Institute (PULSE) is a Stanford Independent Laboratory located in the Central Laboratory at SLAC. PULSE was created by Stanford in 2005 to help Stanford faculty and SLAC scientists develop ultrafast x-ray research at LCLS.

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS)[below] is a free electron laser facility located at SLAC. The LCLS is partially a reconstruction of the last 1/3 of the original linear accelerator at SLAC, and can deliver extremely intense x-ray radiation for research in a number of areas. It achieved first lasing in April 2009.

The laser produces hard X-rays, 10^9 times the relative brightness of traditional synchrotron sources and is the most powerful x-ray source in the world. LCLS enables a variety of new experiments and provides enhancements for existing experimental methods. Often, x-rays are used to take “snapshots” of objects at the atomic level before obliterating samples. The laser’s wavelength, ranging from 6.2 to 0.13 nm (200 to 9500 electron volts (eV)) is similar to the width of an atom, providing extremely detailed information that was previously unattainable. Additionally, the laser is capable of capturing images with a “shutter speed” measured in femtoseconds, or million-billionths of a second, necessary because the intensity of the beam is often high enough so that the sample explodes on the femtosecond timescale.

The LCLS-II [below] project is to provide a major upgrade to LCLS by adding two new X-ray laser beams. The new system will utilize the 500 m (1,600 ft) of existing tunnel to add a new superconducting accelerator at 4 GeV and two new sets of undulators that will increase the available energy range of LCLS. The advancement from the discoveries using this new capabilities may include new drugs, next-generation computers, and new materials.

FACET

In 2012, the first two-thirds (~2 km) of the original SLAC LINAC were recommissioned for a new user facility, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET). This facility was capable of delivering 20 GeV, 3 nC electron (and positron) beams with short bunch lengths and small spot sizes, ideal for beam-driven plasma acceleration studies. The facility ended operations in 2016 for the constructions of LCLS-II which will occupy the first third of the SLAC LINAC. The FACET-II project will re-establish electron and positron beams in the middle third of the LINAC for the continuation of beam-driven plasma acceleration studies in 2019.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) FACET-II upgrading its Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) – a test bed for new technologies that could revolutionize the way we build particle accelerators.

The Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA) is a 60-120 MeV high-brightness electron beam linear accelerator used for experiments on advanced beam manipulation and acceleration techniques. It is located at SLAC’s end station B

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US) Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA)

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory campus with world’s first x-ray laser- the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) unveiled in 2009.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)/LCLS II projected view

Magnets called undulators stretch roughly 100 meters down a tunnel at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, with one side (right) producing hard x-rays and the other soft x-rays.Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

SSRL and LCLS are DOE Office of Science user facilities.

Stanford University (US)

Leland and Jane Stanford founded the University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.

Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.

The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.

As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.

Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.

Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.

Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)(originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.

Land

Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.

Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.

Non-central campus

Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.

On the founding grant:

Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.

Off the founding grant:

Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.

Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.

The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.

China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) (KIAA-PKU).

Administration and organization

Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually.[83] A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).

The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.

As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.

Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.

Endowment and donations

The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University(US), the University of Texas System(US), and Yale University(US) had larger endowments than Stanford.

In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.

Research centers and institutes

DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(US)
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with UC Berkeley(US) and UC San Francisco(US), Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.

Discoveries and innovation

Natural sciences

Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.

Computer and applied sciences

ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.

Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.

Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.

Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.

Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.

RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and UC Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.

Businesses and entrepreneurship

Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.

The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.

Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.

Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:

Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.[163]
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).

Student body

Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.

Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.

As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.

Athletics

As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.

Its traditional sports rival is the University of California, Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.

Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Traditions

The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.

Award laureates and scholars

Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:

19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners

From University of Warwick (UK) via Science Alert (AU) : “The Mystery of White Dwarfs With Intense Magnetic Fields Could Finally Be Solved”

via

Science Alert (AU)

4 MAY 2021
MICHELLE STARR

White dwarf at the heart of the Helix nebula. Credit: K. Su National Aeronautics Space Agency (US)/Chandra X-ray Center (US)/NASA JPL-Caltech (US)/Caltech Spitzer Science Center (US)/NASA Space Telescope Science Institute (US)/European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU)/National Radio Astronomy Observatory (US)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US) Chandra X-ray telescope(US).

National Aeronautics and Space Administration(US) Spitzer Infrared Apace Telescope no longer in service. Launched in 2003 and retired on 30 January 2020.

There’s a lot we don’t understand about white dwarf stars, but one mystery may finally have a solution: how do some of these cosmic objects end up having insanely powerful magnetic fields?

According to new calculations and modelling, these super-dense objects can have a magnetosphere-generating dynamo – but the strongest white dwarf magnetic fields, a million times more powerful than Earth’s, only occur within certain contexts.

Not only does the research resolve several long-standing problems, but once again it shows that very similar phenomena can be observed in wildly different astronomical objects, and that sometimes the Universe is more like itself than we might initially think.

White dwarf stars are what we colloquially call “dead” stars. When a star less than around eight times the mass of the Sun reaches the end of its lifespan, having run out of elements suitable for nuclear fusion, it ejects its outer material. The remaining core collapses down into an object less than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, packed into a sphere around the size of Earth.

The resulting object, shining brightly with residual thermal energy, is a white dwarf, and it’s incredibly dense. Just a single teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh around 15 tons, which means it would not be unreasonable to assume that the interiors of these objects would be very different from the interiors of planets like Earth.

Astrophysicists have been trying to work out how white dwarf stars can have powerful magnetic fields, in ranges up to around a million times stronger than Earth’s. For context, the Sun’s magnetic field is twice as powerful as Earth’s – so something unusual has to be going on with white dwarfs.

It gets a little tricky, though. Only some white dwarfs have powerful magnetic fields. White dwarfs in detached binaries – in which neither star exceeds the region of space within which stellar material is bound by gravity, known as a Roche lobe – less than a billion years old don’t have these magnetic fields.

But for white dwarfs in semi-detached binaries, where one of the stars spills out of its Roche lobe, and the white dwarf is gravitationally slurping material off its lower-mass companion, more than a third of these exhibit strong magnetic fields. And a few strongly magnetic white dwarfs appear in older detached binaries, too.

Stellar evolution models have been unable to explain how this happens, so an international team of astrophysicists took a different approach, proposing a core dynamo that develops over time, rather than at the time of the white dwarf’s formation.

That dynamo would be a rotating, convecting, and electrically conducting fluid that converts kinetic energy into magnetic energy, spinning a magnetic field out into space. In Earth’s case, convection is generated by liquid iron moving around the core.

“We have known for a long time that there was something missing in our understanding of magnetic fields in white dwarfs, as the statistics derived from the observations simply did not make sense,” said physicist Boris Gänsicke of the University of Warwick (UK) .

“The idea that, at least in some of these stars, the field is generated by a dynamo can solve this paradox.”

When a white dwarf first forms, right after losing its outer envelope, it’s very hot, made up of fluid carbon and oxygen. According to the team’s model, as the core of the white dwarf cools and crystallizes, heat escaping outwards creates convection currents, very similar to the way fluid moves around inside Earth, producing a dynamo.

“As the velocities in the liquid can become much higher in white dwarfs than on Earth, the generated fields are potentially much stronger,” explained physicist Matthias Schreiber of the Federico Santa María Technical University [Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María] (CL).

“This dynamo mechanism can explain the occurrence rates of strongly magnetic white dwarfs in many different contexts, and especially those of white dwarfs in binary stars.”

As the white dwarf cools and ages, its orbit with its binary companion grows closer. When the companion exceeds its Roche lobe, and the white dwarf begins accreting material, the spin rate of the white dwarf increases; this faster rotation also affects the dynamo, producing an even stronger magnetic field.

If this magnetic field is strong enough to connect with the magnetic field of the binary companion, the binary companion exerts a torque that causes its orbital motion to synchronize with the white dwarf’s spin, which in turn causes the binary companion to detach from its Roche lobe, returning the system to a detached binary. This process will eventually repeat.

A different mechanism will probably be required to explain the very strongest white dwarf magnetic field strengths, but for now, the team’s results are consistent with observations. White dwarfs in detached binaries are older than a billion years, and have previously experienced mass transfer in a semi-detached stage cut short when a wild magnetic field appeared.

If the team’s model is accurate, future white dwarf observations will continue to be consistent with their findings.

“The beauty of our idea is that the mechanism of magnetic field generation is the same as in planets,” Schreiber said.

“This research explains how magnetic fields are generated in white dwarfs and why these magnetic fields are much stronger than those on Earth. I think it is a good example of how an interdisciplinary team can solve problems that specialists in only one area would have had difficulty with.”

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

See the full article here.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

The establishment of the The University of Warwick (UK) was given approval by the government in 1961 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965.

Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Warwick is a member of AACSB, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Association of MBAs, EQUIS, the European University Association, the Midlands Innovation group, the Russell Group, Sutton 13 and Universities UK. It is the only European member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a collaboration with New York University (US). The university has extensive commercial activities, including the University of Warwick Science Park and Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Twentieth century

The Leicester Warwick Medical School, a new medical school based jointly at Warwick and University of Leicester (UK), opened in September 2000.

Twenty-first century

In September 2015, Warwick celebrated its 50th anniversary (1965–2015) and was designated “University of the Year” by The Times and The Sunday Times.

Research

From University of Warwick (UK): “Researchers discover the mechanism that likely generates huge white dwarf magnetic fields”

April 30, 2021
Peter Thorley

Illustration of the origin of magnetic fields in white dwarfs in close binaries (to be read counter clockwise). The magnetic field appears when a crystallizing white dwarf accretes from a companion star and as a consequence starts to spin rapidly. When the white dwarfs field connects with the field of the secondary star, mass transfer stops for a relatively short period of time. Credit: Paula Zorzi.

A dynamo mechanism could explain the incredibly strong magnetic fields in white dwarf stars according to an international team of scientists, including a University of Warwick astronomer.

One of the most striking phenomena in astrophysics is the presence of magnetic fields. Like the Earth, stars and stellar remnants such as white dwarfs have one. It is known that the magnetic fields of white dwarfs can be a million times stronger than that of the Earth. However, their origin has been a mystery since the discovery of the first magnetic white dwarf in the 1970s. Several theories have been proposed, but none of them has been able to explain the different occurrence rates of magnetic white dwarfs, both as individual stars and in different binary star environments.

This uncertainty may be resolved thanks to research by an international team of astrophysicists, including Professor Boris Gänsicke from the University of Warwick and led by Professor Dr. Matthias Schreiber from Núcleo Milenio de Formación Planetaria at Federico Santa María Technical University [Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María] (CL). The team showed that a dynamo mechanism similar to the one that generates magnetic fields on Earth and other planets can work in white dwarfs, and produce much stronger fields. This research, part-funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Leverhulme Trust, has been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Astronomy.

Professor Boris Gänsicke of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick said: “We have known for a long time that there was something missing in our understanding of magnetic fields in white dwarfs, as the statistics derived from the observations simply did not make sense. The idea that, at least in some of these stars, the field is generated by a dynamo can solve this paradox. Some of you may remember dynamos on bicycles: turning a magnet produces electric current. Here, it works the other way around, the motion of material leads to electric currents, which in turn generate the magnetic field.”

A crystallizing magnetic white dwarf accreting from the wind of its companion star. Credit: Paula Zorzi.

According to the proposed dynamo mechanism, the magnetic field is generated by electric currents caused by convective motion in the core of the white dwarf. These convective currents are caused by heat escaping from the solidifying core.

“The main ingredient of the dynamo is a solid core surrounded by a convective mantle—in the case of the Earth, it is a solid iron core surrounded by convective liquid iron. A similar situation occurs in white dwarfs when they have cooled sufficiently,” explains Matthias Schreiber.

The astrophysicist explains that at the beginning, after the star has ejected its envelope, the white dwarf is very hot and composed of liquid carbon and oxygen. However, when it has sufficiently cooled, it begins to crystallize in the center and the configuration becomes similar to that of the Earth: a solid core surrounded by a convective liquid. “As the velocities in the liquid can become much higher in white dwarfs than on Earth, the generated fields are potentially much stronger. This dynamo mechanism can explain the occurrence rates of strongly magnetic white dwarfs in many different contexts, and especially those of white dwarfs in binary stars” he says.

Thus, this research could solve a decades-old problem. “The beauty of our idea is that the mechanism of magnetic field generation is the same as in planets. This research explains how magnetic fields are generated in white dwarfs and why these magnetic fields are much stronger than those on Earth. I think it is a good example of how an interdisciplinary team can solve problems that specialists in only one area would have had difficulty with,” Schreiber adds.

The next steps in this research, says the astrophysicist, are to perform a more detailed model of the dynamo mechanism and to test observationally the additional predictions of this model.

See the full article here.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

The University of Warwick (UK) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. It was founded in 1965 as part of a government initiative to expand higher education. Within the University, Warwick Business School was established in 1967, Warwick Law School was established in 1968, Warwick Manufacturing Group (now WMG) in 1980, and Warwick Medical School opened in 2000. Warwick incorporated Coventry College of Education in 1979 and Horticulture Research International in 2004.

Warwick is primarily based on a 290 ha (720 acres) campus on the outskirts of Coventry, with a satellite campus in Wellesbourne and a central London base at the Shard. It is organised into three faculties — Arts, Science Engineering and Medicine, and Social Sciences — within which there are 32 departments. As of 2019, Warwick has around 26,531 full-time students and 2,492 academic and research staff. Warwick Arts Centre, a multi-venue arts complex in the university’s main campus, is the largest venue of its kind in the UK outside London.

Some competitive employment sectors, such as Investment Banking, regard Warwick in their top 6 “magic circle” of universities, alongside London School of Economics; University College London(UK); University of Oxford(UK); University of Cambridge(UK); and Imperial College London(UK). Its politics department is also included in the Political Studies Associations’ UK ‘big five’ politics departments. Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Warwick is a member of AACSB; the Association of Commonwealth Universities; the Association of MBAs; EQUIS; the European University Association; the Midlands Innovation group; the Russell Group; Sutton 13; and Universities UK. It is the only European member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress, a collaboration with New York University. The university has extensive commercial activities, including the University of Warwick Science Park and Warwick Manufacturing Group.

Warwick’s alumni and staff include winners of the Nobel Prize; Turing Award; Fields Medal; Richard W. Hamming Medal; Emmy Award; Grammy; and the Padma Vibhushan; fellows to the British Academy; the Royal Society of Literature; the Royal Academy of Engineering; and the Royal Society. Alumni also include heads of state; government officials; leaders in intergovernmental organisations and the current chief economist at the Bank of England. Researchers at Warwick have also made significant contributions such as the development of penicillin; music therapy; Washington Consensus; Second-wave feminism; computing standards including ISO and ECMA; complexity theory; contract theory; and the International Political Economy as a field of study.

From University of Warwick (UK): “First transiting exoplanet’s ‘chemical fingerprint’ reveals its distant birthplace”

7 April 2021

Peter Thorley
Media Relations Manager
(Warwick Medical School and Department of Physics)
peter.thorley@warwick.ac.uk
Mob: +44 (0) 7824 540863

Exoplanet HD 209458b transits its star. The illuminated crescent and its colours have been exaggerated to illustrate the light spectra that the astronomers used to identify the six molecules in its atmosphere. Credit: Mark Garlick/University of Warwick.

Analysis by international team including University of Warwick of the first transiting exoplanet that was discovered has revealed six different chemicals in its atmosphere.

It is the first time that so many molecules have been measured, and points to an atmosphere with more carbon present than oxygen.

This chemical fingerprint is typical of a planet that formed much further away from its sun than the current location, a mere 7 million km from the star.

Study tests techniques that will be useful for detecting signs of potentially habitable planets when more powerful telescopes come online.

Astronomers have found evidence that the first exoplanet that was identified transiting its star could have migrated to a close orbit with its star from its original birthplace further away.

Analysis of the planet’s atmosphere by a team including University of Warwick scientists has identified the chemical fingerprint of a planet that formed much further away from its sun than it currently resides. It confirms previous thinking that the planet has moved to its current position after forming, a mere 7 million km from its sun or the equivalent of 1/20th the distance from the Earth to our Sun.

The conclusions are published 7 April, 2021 in the journal Nature by an international team of astronomers. The University of Warwick led the modelling and interpretation of the results which mark the first time that as many as six molecules in the atmosphere of an exoplanet have been measured to determine its composition.

It is also the first time that astronomers have used these six molecules to definitively pinpoint the location at which these hot, giant planets form thanks to the composition of their atmospheres.

With new, more powerful telescopes coming online soon, their technique could also be used to study the chemistry of exoplanets that could potentially host life.

This latest research used the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in La Palma, Spain, to acquire high-resolution spectra of the atmosphere of the exoplanet HD 209458b as it passed in front of its host star on four separate occasions.

Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (IT) (ES) a 3.58-meter Italian telescope, located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory [Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ](ES) on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, Altitude 2,396 m (7,861 ft).

The light from the star is altered as it passes through the planet’s atmosphere and by analysing the differences in the resulting spectrum astronomers can determine what chemicals are present and their abundances.

For the first time, astronomers were able to detect hydrogen cyanide, methane, ammonia, acetylene, carbon monoxide and low amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere of HD 209458b. The unexpected abundance of carbon-based molecules (hydrogen cyanide, methane, acetylene and carbon monoxide) suggests that there are approximately as many carbon atoms as oxygen atoms in the atmosphere, double the carbon expected. This suggests that the planet has preferentially accreted gas rich in carbon during formation, which is only possible if it orbited much further out from its star when it originally formed, most likely at a similar distance to Jupiter or Saturn in our own solar system.

Dr Siddharth Gandhi of the University of Warwick Department of Physics said: “The key chemicals are carbon-bearing and nitrogen-bearing species. If these species are at the level we’ve detected them, this is indicative of an atmosphere that is enriched in carbon compared to oxygen. We’ve used these six chemical species for the first time to narrow down where in its protoplanetary disc it would have originally formed.

“There is no way that a planet would form with an atmosphere so rich in carbon if it is within the condensation line of water vapour. At the very hot temperature of this planet (1,500K), if the atmosphere contains all the elements in the same proportion as in the parent star, oxygen should be twice more abundant than carbon and mostly bonded with hydrogen to form water or to carbon to form carbon monoxide. Our very different finding agrees with the current understanding that hot Jupiters like HD 209458b formed far away from their current location.”

Using models of planetary formation, the astronomers compared HD 209458b’s chemical fingerprint with what they would expect to see for a planet of that type.

A solar system begins life as a disc of material surrounding the star which gathers together to form the solid cores of planets, which then accrete gaseous material to form an atmosphere. Close to the star where it is hotter, a large proportion of oxygen remains in the atmosphere in water vapour. Further out, as it gets cooler, that water condenses to become ice and is locked into a planet’s core, leaving an atmosphere more heavily comprised of carbon- and nitrogen-based molecules. Therefore, planets orbiting close to the sun are expected to have atmospheres rich in oxygen, rather than carbon.

HD 209458b was the first exoplanet to be identified using the transit method, by observing it as it passed in front of its star. It has been the subject of many studies, but this is the first time that six individual molecules have been measured in its atmosphere to create a detailed ‘chemical fingerprint’.

Dr Matteo Brogi from the University of Warwick team adds: “By scaling up these observations, we’ll be able to tell what classes of planet we have out there in terms of their formation location and early evolution. It’s really important that we don’t work under the assumptions that there is only a couple of molecular species that are important to determine the spectra of these planets, as has frequently been done before. Detecting as many molecules as possible is useful when we move on to testing this technique on planets with conditions that are amenable for hosting life, because we will need to have a full portfolio of chemical species we can detect.”

Paolo Giacobbe, researcher at the INAF Italian National Institute for Astrophysics [Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica](IT) and lead author of the paper, said: “If this discovery were a novel it would begin with ‘In the beginning there was only water…’ because the vast majority of the inference on exoplanet atmospheres from near-infrared observations was based on the presence (or absence) of water vapour, which dominates this region of the spectrum. We asked ourselves: is it really possible that all the other species expected from theory do not leave any measurable trace? Discovering that it is possible to detect them, thanks to our efforts in improving analysis techniques, opens new horizons to be explored.”

See the full article here.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

The establishment of the The University of Warwick (UK) was given approval by the government in 1961 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965.

Warwick has an average intake of 4,950 undergraduates out of 38,071 applicants (7.7 applicants per place).

Twentieth century

The Leicester Warwick Medical School, a new medical school based jointly at Warwick and University of Leicester (UK), opened in September 2000.

Twenty-first century

In September 2015, Warwick celebrated its 50th anniversary (1965–2015) and was designated “University of the Year” by The Times and The Sunday Times.

Research

From University of Warwick (UK) via Live Science: “White dwarfs wear the crushed corpses of planets in their atmospheres”

via

Live Science

2.13.21
Brandon Specktor

When a star collapses, it throws its solar system into total chaos. Sometimes, that chaos leaves a mark.

Astronomers are looking for the bones of dead planets inside the corpses of dead stars — and they may have just found some.

In a paper published Feb. 11 in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers described how they used data from the Gaia space satellite to peer into the atmospheres of four white dwarfs — the shriveled, crystalline husks of once-massive stars that burned through all their fuel. Swirling among the hot soup of hydrogen and helium surrounding those stars, the team detected clear traces of lithium, sodium and potassium — metals that are abundant in planetary crusts — in the precise ratio that they’d expect to find inside a rocky planet.

“Comparing all these elements together against different types of planetary material in the solar system, we found that the composition was distinctly different from all but one type of material: continental crust,” lead study author Mark Hollands, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in England, told Live Science in an email.

According to Hollands and his colleagues, the presence of these crusty metals suggests that each of the old, faded stars they analyzed may have once sat at the center of a solar system not so different from ours; then, in their dying eons, those stars ripped their solar systems to shreds and gobbled up the remains.

Our solar system, too, may share this fate.

When stars die

Over billions of years, stars with masses between about a one-tenth and eight times the mass of the sun burn through their nuclear fuel. When this happens, those old stars shed their fiery outer layers and shrivel into a hot, white, compact core that packs half a sun’s-worth of mass into a ball no wider than Earth — a white dwarf.

These smoldering balls of energy have an extremely strong gravitational pull and are incredibly hot and bright — at first. But the older a white dwarf gets, the cooler and duller it gets, and the more wavelengths of light become visible in its atmosphere. By studying those wavelengths, scientists can calculate the elemental composition of that star’s atmosphere.

Most white dwarf atmospheres are dominated by either hydrogen or helium, the researchers said, but they can become “polluted” by other elements if the dead star’s intense gravity draws in material from the space around it. If a white dwarf happens to suck in the chunks of a broken planet, for example, then “any elements in the destroyed object can release their own light, giving a spectral fingerprint that astronomers can potentially spot,” Hollands said.

In their new paper, Hollands and his colleagues targeted four old white dwarfs within 130 light-years of Earth, to see if their atmospheres carried any evidence of planetary remains. Each dead star was between 5 billion and 10 billion years old, and cool enough for the astronomers to detect wavelengths of light emitted by metallic elements shining out of their dim atmospheres.

In all four old stars, the researchers detected a combination of lithium and other metals that closely matched the composition of planetary debris. One star, which the team caught an especially clear view of, contained metals in its atmosphere that “provided an almost perfect match to the Earth’s continental crust,” Hollands said.

To the researchers, there is only one logical explanation: The old white dwarfs still hold the smoldering remains of the very planets they once shined their light upon. To end up in a white dwarf’s atmosphere, those planetary remains must have been pulled in by the star’s intense gravity millions of years ago, after the star finished its stint as a red giant and jettisoned its outer layers of gas into space, Hollands said.

Any planets close to the star would have been obliterated during the red giant phase (just as Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth will be swallowed up by our sun in its dying days), but any planets that survived long enough to see their sun become a white dwarf would also see their solar system’s gravity go haywire.

“After the red giant phase has ended and the sun has become a white dwarf, planetary orbits can become more chaotic as the white dwarf sun has only half of its former mass, and the planets are now farther away,” Hollands said.

This gravitational disruption increases the risk of planetary collisions, he added, which could fill the solar system with broken, rocky remains of dead worlds. Larger, outer solar system planets (like Jupiter, for example) could then exert their own powerful gravity to send those remains flying out of orbit; some of them might end up close enough to the white dwarf sun to get sucked in and amalgamated.

While something along these lines seems to have occurred around the four white dwarfs that Hollands and his colleagues studied, it’s anyone’s guess whether Earth will ever meet a similar fate. According to study co-author Boris Gaensicke, also a professor at the University of Warwick, it’s likely that our planet will get swallowed up during the sun’s red giant phase, leaving no elements behind for alien astronomers to detect.

However, that doesn’t mean those extraterrestrial telescopes will come up empty-handed.

“I wouldn’t bet on those alien astronomers detecting the lithium of all the defunct Teslas in the solar white dwarf,” Gaensicke told Live Science. “But, there is a good chance that they could see asteroids, comets, moons or even Mars being gobbled up.”

See the full article here.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

The establishment of the The University of Warwick (UK) was given approval by the government in 1961 and received its Royal Charter of Incorporation in 1965.

From University of Warwick (UK): “Rapid-forming giants could disrupt spiral protoplanetary discs”

26 November 2020

Peter Thorley
Media Relations Manager (Warwick Medical School and Department of Physics)
Press & Media Relations
University of Warwick
Email: peter.thorley@warwick.ac.uk
Mob: +44 (0) 7824 540863

Simulations by University of Warwick astrophysicists show that interactions with giant planets could result in protoplanetary discs that look older than they should
Massive young discs are expected to show spiral structures, but these are rarely observed with telescopes
Could be explained by the presence of giant planets early in the disc’s lifecycle
Images and video simulations available in Notes to Editors

Giant planets that developed early in a star system’s life could solve a mystery of why spiral structures are not observed in young protoplanetary discs, according to a new study by University of Warwick astronomers.

The research, published today (26 November) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and part supported by the Royal Society, provides an explanation for the lack of spiral structure that astronomers expect to see in protoplanetary discs around young stars that also suggests that scientists may have to reassess how quickly planets form in a disc’s lifecycle.

Protoplanetary discs are the birthplaces of planets, harbouring the material that will eventually coalesce into the array of planets that we see in the Universe. When these discs are young they form spiral structures, with all their dust and material dragged into dense arms by the massive gravitational effect of the disc spinning. A similar effect occurs at the galactic level, hence why we see spiral galaxies such as our own, the Milky Way.

Over the course of three to ten million years material from the disc comes together to form planets, falls onto the star it is orbiting or just disperses into space through winds coming off the disc. When a disc is young it is self-gravitating, and the material within it forms a spiral structure which it loses when it becomes gravitationally stable. Young planets that develop then carve out gaps in the disc as they consume and disperse material in their way, resulting in the ‘ring and gap’ features that astronomers most commonly see in protoplanetary discs.

But astronomers have struggled to account for observations of young protoplanetary discs that show no signs of spirals, but instead look like a disc much older with a ring and gap structure. To provide an explanation, Sahl Rowther and Dr Farzana Meru from the University of Warwick Department of Physics conducted computer simulations of massive planets in young discs to determine what would happen when they interacted.

Video showing the comparison of a protoplanetary disc’s evolution without a planet (left) and with an orbiting 3 Jupiter mass planet (right).

They found that a giant planet, around three times the mass of Jupiter, migrating from the outer regions of the disc towards its star would cause enough disruption to wipe out the disc’s spiral structure with results much like the discs observed by astronomers. However, to be present in the spiral stage of the disc those planets would have to form rapidly and early in the disc’s lifecycle.

Lead author Sahl Rowther, PhD student in the Department of Physics, said: “When discs are young, we expect them to be massive with spiral structures. But we don’t see that in observations.

“Our simulations suggest that a massive planet in one of these young discs can actually shorten the time spent in the self-gravitating spiral phase to one that looks more like some of the observations that astronomers are seeing.

Co-author Dr Farzana Meru from the Department of Physics adds: “If some of these discs that astronomers are observing were recently self-gravitating then that suggests they formed a planet while the disc was still young. The self-gravitating phase for a protoplanetary disc is much less than about half a million years, which means the planet would have to have formed incredibly quickly.

“Irrespective of what mechanism explains how these planets form, this probably means that we have to consider that planets form much faster than originally thought.”

Their simulations modelled a giant planet in the outer regions of a protoplanetary disc as it migrates inwards, a process that astronomers expect to see as the torque pushes the planet inwards as it exchanges angular momentum with the gas in the disc. This also means that the planet would interact with and disrupt a large proportion of the disc and be massive enough to open a gap in the gas, resulting in the ring and gap structure.

Sahl Rowther adds: “This is exciting given the unknowns associated with the masses of observed discs. If massive discs with ring and gap structures are common, it could provide more pathways in explaining disc architectures.

“Our results suggest that it may even be possible to see signs of these giant planets, given the right conditions and technology. The next stage of our research will be to determine what those conditions are, to help astronomers in trying to determine the presence of these planets.”

Dr Meru adds: “It’s quite possible for that spiral structure to be wiped out, don’t be fooled when you look at a disc. It could still be reasonably massive, it’s just that a giant planet has caused it to lose its spirals.

“We have these amazing images of protoplanetary discs and what’s really exciting about them is their structure. In the past few years telescopes have become very powerful and we’re able to see features like gaps and rings. With computer simulations like ours, we can now try to understand if some of the processes that we expect to happen, like planets migrating in young discs, can lead to the kind of images that observers are seeing. This is possible with the combination of powerful telescopes and supercomputers.”

Images and video available to download:

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november_2020/3jb5500.mp4Video showing a protoplanetary disc’s evolution with an orbiting 3 Jupiter mass planet.

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november_2020/b5500.mp4Video showing the protoplanetary disc’s evolution without a planet.

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november_2020/planetimpactcomparison.mp4Video showing the comparison of a protoplanetary disc’s evolution without a planet (left) and with an orbiting 3 Jupiter mass planet (right).

Images:

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november_2020/with3j_planet.png Protoplanetary disc with an orbiting planet

https://warwick.ac.uk/services/communications/medialibrary/images/november_2020/withoutplanet.pngProtoplanetary disc without a planet

See the full article here.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.