| Scientific news THE SHORTEST-PERIOD BINARY STAR SYSTEM KNOWN IN THE GALAXY IS RESISTING INSPIRAL 27 June 2023 WHT+INT (IDS, ULTRACAM) |
A study led by James Munday (PhD student at the University of Warwick and support astronomer in the ING Studentship Programme 2022/2023) has recently been published that exploits optical photometry of HM Cancri, spanning more than 20 years. This long time-baseline has led to the determination of an incredibly precise orbital decay constraint for the system by timing the phasing of an optical modulation, which would not have been possible without the Isaac Newton Telescope, and the William Herschel Telescope.
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| Scientific news WHT HELPS TO MEASURE THE SIZE OF A STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLE JET 31 October 2017 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
Nothing can emerge from a black hole. Yet, in nature, we find ultra-powerful jets of energy that shoot out from the immediate vicinities of growing black holes.
How these jets form remains a puzzle. In a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, astronomers announce that they have new clues to this mystery.
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| Scientific news A RADIO PULSING WHITE DWARF BINARY STAR 28 July 2016 WHT + INT (ISIS + ULTRACAM + IDS) |
Astronomers have discovered a new type of exotic binary star. In the system AR Scorpii a rapidly spinning white dwarf star powers electrons up to almost the speed of light. These high energy particles release blasts of radiation that lash the companion red dwarf star, and cause the entire system to pulse dramatically every 1.97 minutes with radiation ranging from the ultraviolet to radio. The research is published in the journal Nature on 28 July 2016.
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| Scientific news FAST AND FURIOUS BLACK HOLE OBSERVED WITH THE WHT 16 March 2016 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
In a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers report catching V404 Cygni black hole while it was shimmering and emitting red flashes, some of which were shorter than a timespan of only 1/40th of a second.
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| Scientific news COMMON ACCRETION ACROSS YOUNG STELLAR OBJECTS, WHITE DWARFS, BLACK HOLES AND SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES 16 October 2015 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
An international team of astronomers have discovered a previously unknown link between the way young stars, white dwarfs and black holes grow feeding from their surroundings. Accretion seems to be a universal process operating in a similar way despite the different size, age, temperature and gravity of the accreted object.
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| Scientific news ONE OF MOST ACCURATE MEASUREMENTS OF THE SIZE OF A TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECT FROM A STELLAR OCCULTATION 15 December 2014 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
Stellar occultations by minor bodies have been widely used to measure their sizes and constrain their shapes. One such event was observed at the William Herschel Telescope during the first hours of the night April 26, 2012 using ULTRACAM, a very fast camera able to obtain short exposures with very short overheads. They were able to measure a total eclipse duration of 20.87 seconds which translates into a chord of 41
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| Video release A STELLAR ECLIPSE BY 2002 KX14 15 December 2014 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
hanks to the high time resolution of ULTRACAM and the large aperture of the William Herschel Telescope, astronomers recorded the most accurate chord ever obtained for an occultation by a Trans-Neptunian Object (TNO), with a length of 415. This is a lower limit to the size of (119951) 2002 KX14 assuming it has a spherical shape.
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| Scientific news PROFESSOR VIKRAM DHILLON IS AWARDED THE 2013 RAS JACKSON-GWILT MEDAL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATION OF ULTRACAM 13 February 2013 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
ULTRACAM is an ultra-fast, triple-beam CCD camera designed to study
astrophysics on the fastest timescales. The instrument was built by a
consortium involving the Universities of Sheffield (Vik Dhillon), Warwick (Tom Marsh) and the UK
Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh. It saw first light
on the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) on La Palma in 2002. The large quantity of observing time awarded
to ULTRACAM (totalling one year of nights over the last decade) on
some of the worlds largest telescopes is testament to the
competitiveness of the science performed with the instrument.
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| Scientific news ULTRACAM OBTAINS THE FIRST OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE OF A DEAD CATACLYSMIC VARIABLE 20 December 2006 WHT (ULTRACAM) |
A long-standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from substellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined with the challenge of detecting the donor against the light from accretion, means that no donor star to date has a measured mass below the hydrogen burning limit. Now astronomers using ULTRACAM on the William Herschel Telescope claim the first detection.
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