The department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton has seen a strong performance in the Complete University Guide institutional rankings for 2017, moving forward five places to 14th in the UK.

Among the prestigious Russell Group of universities, Southampton jointly led the Physics and Astronomy table for Student Satisfaction.

Alongside Physics and Astronomy within the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Electronics and Computer Science saw placements at third and sixth respectively for Electrical & Electronic Engineering and for Computer Science. Overall, the University of Southampton consolidated its position among the UK’s top 20 universities by placing 17th.

Professor Bashir M Al-Hashimi, Dean of the Faculty of Physical Sciences and Engineering commented: “Continued success in these tables is an excellent achievement. I thank staff across the faculty for their hard work and commitment in delivering such high quality education for our students within the context of world-class research activity. I am particularly proud of our success in the area of Student Satisfaction, a reflection of the dedication and investment given to ensuring the best possible experience for our students.â€?

The Complete University Guide – one of three principal UK-based rankings for UK universities – is based on a wide range of criteria including UCAS entry tariffs, student satisfaction, research excellence and intensity, graduate prospects, student-staff ratio, university spending on academic services and facilities, the percentage of first degree graduates achieving a first or upper second class honours degree, and degree completion.

Joe Spencer, University of Southampton nanotechnology PhD student won the IOP’s Three minute Wonder contest in a grand final held at the Royal Institution on 5 May.

Spencer was competing against nine other finalists who took on the challenge of explaining their research to a public audience in an engaging way in just three minutes. All had been winners or runners-up in regional heats that have been taking place around the country since October.

Describing his work in making nanoscale wires just one or two atoms across, Spencer explained how materials constructed in this way can have completely different properties from their macroscale forms. He also explained his use of Raman spectroscopy and concluded: “Keep your eye out for nanotechnology – it really is the next big thing.â€?

The judges commended his clarity and self-deprecating humour – a particular asset as nanotechnology can be an intimidating concept to a nonspecialist audience, they said.

On the judging panel were radio and television presenter Maggie Philbin, the Royal Greenwich Observatory's public astronomer Marek Kukula, children’s BBC science presenter Fran Scott, and BBC Science Unit executive producer Helen Thomas.

Spencer was voted best by both the audience and the judges. While Sebastian Wood from the National Physical Laboratory was voted runner-up by the audience, the judges chose Kerstin Goepfrich as runner-up for her talk on DNA origami, which explained how a molecular folding technique is leading to applications in medicine, computing and possibly solar cell technology.

Southampton’s Spencer and Goepfrich, from the University of Cambridge, received trophies and a cheque for £500 and £250 respectively. Presenting the prizes, the IOP’s president, Professor Roy Sambles, said of all the contestants: “UK physics is in good hands; I think that was fantastic.â€?

Speaking afterwards, Spencer said the competition had been tough as everyone had done so well. “I am over the moon – it's incredible.â€?

An international team of astrophysicists, including Professor Phil Charles from the University of Southampton, have detected an intense wind from one of the closest known black holes to the Earth.

During observations of V404 Cygni, which went into a bright and violent outburst in June 2015 after more than 25 years of quiescence, the team began taking optical measurements of the black hole’s accretion disc using the 10.4m Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) - the biggest optical-infrared telescope in the world, situated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Garafía, La Palma) in the Canary Islands.

The results, which are published today in Nature, show the presence of a wind of neutral material (unionised hydrogen and helium), which is formed in the outer layers of the accretion disc, regulating the accretion of material by the black hole. This wind, detected for the first time in a system of this type, has a very high velocity (3,000 kilometres per second) so that it can escape from the gravitational field around the black hole.

Professor Charles, from Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton, said: “Its presence allows us to explain why the outburst, in spite of being bright and very violent, with continuous changes in luminosity and ejections of mass in the form of jets, was also very brief, lasting only two weeks.â€?

At the end of this outburst the GTC observations revealed the presence of a nebula formed from material expelled by the wind. This phenomenon, which has been observed for the first time in a black hole, also allows scientists to estimate the quantity of mass ejected into the interstellar medium.

Teo Muñoz Darias, a researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the lead author of the study (and also a former Marie Curie Fellow at Southampton), said: “The brightness of the source and the large collecting area of the GTC allowed us not only to detect the wind, but also to measure the variation of its properties on time-scales of minutes. The database obtained is probably the best ever observed for an object of this kind.

“This outburst of V404 Cygni, because of its complexity and because of the high quantity and quality of the observations, will help us understand how black holes swallow material via their accretion discs.â€?

“We think that what we have observed with the GTC in V404 Cygni happens, at least, in other black holes with large accretion discs,â€? concluded Professor Charles and Jorge Casares from IAC, two of the discoverers of V404 Cygni in 1992, and co-authors of the study.

V404 Cygni is a black hole within a binary system located in the constellation of Cygnus. In such systems, of which less than 50 are known, a black hole of around 10 times the mass of the Sun is swallowing material from a very nearby star, its companion star. During this process material falls onto the black hole and forms an accretion disc, whose hotter, innermost zones emit in X-rays. In the outer regions, however, we can study the disc in visible light, which is the part of the spectrum observable with the GTC.

V404 Cygni, at only 8,000 light years away, is one of the closest known black holes to the Earth, and has a particularly large accretion disc (with a radius of about ten million kilometres), making its outbursts especially bright at all wavelengths (X-rays, visible, infrared and radio waves).

On 15 June 2015, V404 Cygni went into outburst after a quiescence of over 25 years. During this period its brightness increased one million fold in a few days, becoming the brightest X-ray source in the sky. The GTC began taking spectroscopic observations on 17 June via the activation of a “target of opportunityâ€? programme, designed by IAC researchers for this kind of event.

The observations were made with the OSIRIS instrument on the GTC, and were carried out during the two weeks of the outburst, in observing windows of one to two hours per night. In addition, the study included observations in X-rays by the INTEGRAL and SWIFT satellites, as well as data from the AMI radio-interferometer in the United Kingdom.

Nine of the series of data obtained during the night of 27 June were obtained with the GTC in the presence of His Majesty King Felipe VI of Spain, who attended the observations as part of the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the Canary Island Observatories. The King was able to observe at first hand the exceptional range of phenomena exhibited by this black hole.

The research team was led by the IAC astrophysicist Teo Muñoz Darias, and included four other members of the same institute: Jorge Casares, Daniel Mata Sánchez, Montserrat Armas Padilla, and Manuel Linares, as well as researchers from the universities of Oxford and Southampton in the United Kingdom, and from research institutes in Germany, France and Japan.

The 34th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory will bring together a global community of researchers from theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory, who employ theoretical, numerical and computational methods to study the properties of strongly interacting physical systems – above all Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory which describes the interactions of quarks and gluons and how they bind together to form the particles we see in experiments.

The Symposium has only come to England once during the 34 years, when it took place in Edinburgh in 1997. The University of Southampton looks forward to welcoming fellow researchers to this annual event.

Astronomers have detected a sub-stellar object that used to be a star, after being consumed by its white dwarf companion.

An international team of astronomers made the discovery by observing a very faint binary system, J1433 which is located 730 light-years away. The system consists of a low-mass object – about 60 times the mass of Jupiter – in an extremely tight 78-minute orbit around a white dwarf (the remnant of a star like our Sun).

Due to their close proximity, the white dwarf strips mass from its low-mass companion. This process has removed about 90 per cent of the mass of the companion, turning it from a star into a brown dwarf.

Most brown dwarfs are ‘failed stars’, objects that were born with too little mass to shine brightly by fusing hydrogen in their cores. By contrast, the brown dwarf in this system was born as a full-fledged star, but has been stripped to its current mass by billions of years of stellar cannibalism.

The study, published in the journal Nature, used the X-Shooter instrument at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Cerro Paranal, Chile, in order to directly detect and characterise a system that has survived such a traumatic transition.

Lead author Juan Venancio Hernández Santisteban, a PhD student at the University of Southampton, said: “X-Shooter is a unique instrument that can observe astronomical objects simultaneously all the way from the ultraviolet to the infrared. This allowed us to dissect the light of this system and uncover the hidden signal from the faint brown dwarf.

“Our knowledge of binary evolution suggests that, if the companion star can survive the transition, brown dwarfs should be common in this type of system. However, despite several efforts, only a few candidate systems with tentative evidence for brown-dwarf companions had previously been found. Our results now confirm that the successful transformation of a star to a brown dwarf is indeed possible.â€?

The astronomers also used their data to map the surface temperature across the brown dwarf. This turns out to be non-uniform, since this cool sub-stellar object is strongly irradiated by its much hotter white dwarf companion. The map shows a clear temperature difference between the dayside (the side facing the white dwarf) and the nightside. On average, the difference amounts to 57 degrees Celsius, but the hottest and coldest parts of the brown dwarf’s surface differ by a full 200 degrees Celsius.

Professor Christian Knigge, from the University of Southampton who initiated and supervised the project, said: “The construction of this surface temperature map is a significant achievement. In many giant planets – the so-called ‘hot-Jupiters’ – irradiation by the host star completely overwhelms the planet’s internal heat flux. By contrast, internal heat flux and external irradiation are comparable for the brown dwarf in our study. This represents an unexplored regime, making such systems valuable as laboratories for irradiated (sub-) stellar and planetary atmospheres.â€?

The study involved astronomers from the universities of Keele, Manchester, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton and Warwick (UK), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain) and Hamburger Sternwarte (Germany). It was funded by the Royal Astronomical Society, European Union Eleventh Framework Programme, European Research Council, CONACyT (Mexico) and the University of Southampton.

Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton has ranked 4th in the latest 2017 Guardian University Guide. This is a significant leap up 15 places compared to the 2016 ranking (19th).

The result reflects the hard work that Physics and Astronomy have put in, with student satisfaction showing an increase in all areas including teaching, feedback, support and personal development.

“This fantastic result demonstrates the high quality teaching and learning environment at Southamptonâ€? said Jonathan Flynn, Head of Physics and Astronomy at Southampton. “It’s great news for current and prospective students. Our passionate academics, teaching and technical staff help our students to study, research and gain experience to reach their goals.â€?

The Guardian tables are based on data from the UK’s National Student Survey and Higher Education Statistics Agency, covering teaching quality and feedback, spending per student, staff/student ratios, job prospects, a “value addedâ€? criterion (comparing students’ degree results with entry qualifications), and entry scores.

Physics and Astronomy has continued to hold its position in the top 20 across the Guardian, Times and Complete University Guide over the past few years. The University of Southampton has also consolidated its position amongst the UK’s top 20 institutions.