The chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, Mark Richmond,
last week fired the first shots in a campaign to make Britain home to one
of Europe’s biggest research centres.
Richmond pledged support for building the proposed European neutron
source at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, already home
to the ISIS particle accelerator. Speaking at the launch of the SERC’s corporate
plan, Richmond identified as ‘the gleam in my eye’ a proposal to make the
neutron pulses generated by ISIS 30 times more intense than they are now.
ISIS could then form the core of the new European source.
Tilting at the Treasury’s reluctance to have international centres based
in Britain, Richmond warned: ‘The UK has got to be prepared to host some
of these facilities’. At present, the Joint European Torus fusion centre
in Oxfordshire is the only large international research centre in Britain.
In the 1980s, neutron sources became an invaluable tool for probing
the structure of materials. At ISIS, for example, researchers succeeded
in discovering the structure of high-temperature superconductors from powders,
rather than the crystals needed in the past.
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Several proposals for the neutron source were discussed at a meeting
at the RAL sponsored by the European Commission earlier this month. The
neutrons could come either from a new nuclear reactor or from a particle
accelerator. But high on the list of possibilities is the modification of
the circular ISIS accelerator.
This would involve construction of a linear accelerator 1 kilometre
long to boost the intensity of the pulses of neutrons from ISIS. The new
beam would then be split in three, to treble the number of users. Finally,
three new rings would be built in the existing tunnel. This would make each
pulse shorter, which would allow more precise measurements to be taken.
According to the director of the RAL, Paul Williams, upgrading ISIS
would be considerably cheaper than building a neutron generator from scratch.
‘It will have to be a corporate European programme,’ said Williams last
week.
![Astronomers have long known that understanding how star clusters come to be is key to unlocking other secrets of galactic evolution. Stars form in clusters, created when clouds of gas collapse under gravity. As more and more stars are born in a collapsing cloud, strong stellar winds, harsh ultraviolet radiation and the supernova explosions of massive stars eventually disperse the cloud, and their light can bear down on other star-forming regions in the galaxy. This process is called stellar feedback, and it means that most of the gas in a galaxy never gets used for star formation. Researching how star clusters develop can answer questions about star formation at a galactic scale. Now, the state of the art has been further developed with both Hubble and Webb working together to provide a broad-spectrum view of thousands of young star clusters. An international team of astronomers has pored over images of four nearby galaxies from the FEAST observing programme (#1783), trying to solve this mystery. Their results show that it is the most massive star clusters that clear away their gaseous shroud the fastest, and begin lighting their galaxy the earliest. The team identified nearly 9000 star clusters in the four galaxies in different evolutionary stages: young clusters just starting to emerge from their natal clouds of gas, clusters that had partially dispersed the gas (both from Webb images), and fully unobstructed clusters visible in optical light (found in Hubble images). With Webb???s ability to peer inside the gas clouds, they were able to then estimate the mass and age of each cluster from its light spectrum. This image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51), one of the four galaxies studied in this work, as seen by Webb???s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). The thick clumps of star-forming gas are shown here in red and orange, representing infrared light emitted by ionised gas, dust grains, and complex molecules such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Within these gas complexes, each tens or hundreds of light years across, Webb reveals the dense, extremely bright clusters of massive stars that have just recently formed. The countless stars strewn across the arm of the galaxy, many of which would be invisible to our eyes behind layers of dust, are also laid bare in infrared light. [Image description: A large, long portion of one of the spiral arms in galaxy M51. Red-orange, clumpy filaments of gas and dust that stretch in a chain from left to right comprise the arm. Shining cyan bubbles light up parts of the gas clouds from within, and gaps expose bright star clusters in these bubbles as glowing white dots. The whole image is dotted with small stars. A faint blue glow around the arm colours the otherwise dark background.]](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/13114322/SEI_296271016.jpg)
