Professional Knowledge: Physics

Designed for science teachers wishing to advance their professional knowledge, this video from Teachers TV highlights some cutting edge physics projects within the UK.

This includes:

• Particle accelerators

• Lasers

• Containing plasma and harnessing fusion

• Space exploration...

Exo-planets

Finding exoplanetsExoplanets are planets outside our own solar system. Find out how scientists use ingenious methods to spot them.

Goldilocks zoneFinding the right conditions to support life is a delicate...

Balloons in Space

The Big Picture on pages 10-11 of this issue of Catalyst shows scientists in Antarctica launching a balloon which will travel up through the atmosphere to a height of 34 km above the Earth’s surface. This balloon is part of NASA’s BARREL mission, probing the radiation belts which surround the Earth.

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Launching a Balloon to the Edge of Space

The STEM club from Holy Cross School in Chorley and the North West Local Centre of the Royal Meteorological Society collaborated on a project to launch a balloon into the atmosphere. The balloon was carrying a camera, a GPS transmitter and a radiosonde, an instrument which transmits measurements by radio waves back...

Exoplanets

This animated clip explains how planets outside our solar system are difficult to see because they get lost in the glare of the star they orbit. The clip briefly mentions Doppler shift, dimming through transit as detection techniques that enable us to infer what the planet is made of, and explains what the...

space:uk - Summer 2012, Issue 35

This special space:UK issue from the UK Space Agency, celebrating 50 years of the UK’s expansion into space, looks into stories about the first British satellite, and its demise, and the latest of innovative ideas such as a European spacecraft designed to fly closer to the sun than ever before. Articles in this...

space:uk - Winter 2012, Issue 36

This edition of space:UK, from the UK Space Agency, includes a focus on satellite navigation, ESA ministerial meetings and six pages dedicated to social media. Articles include: - Recent news: Reports from the ESA Ministerial meeting, success for new weather satellite and space stamps celebrate UK achievements -...

Aerogels

This Catalyst article investigates the nature of aerogels, which are among the least dense solid materials, not much denser than air. Aerogels were made as the result of a bet and ended up going into space to capture comet dust. They are the lightest solids which exist and have some unusual features.

The...

Gaia's Mission: Solving the Celestial Puzzle

This film documents the mission to create the largest, most-accurate, map of the Milky Way in three dimensions, which will revolutionise our understanding of the galaxy and the universe beyond. On 19th December 2013, a rocket blasted into the sky from a launch site in French Guiana and travelled 1.5 million km to...

Defying Gravity

The 2013 Institute of Physics Schools Lecture - Defying Gravity: Laura Thomas, an independent science communicator with a background in astrophysics, talks about the physics of space flight. She explains how studying physics and mathematics could...