News Dolphins Present Astrophysics Research at Orbyts Conference 25.06.2026

On Tuesday 23 June, twelve students attended the annual Orbyts conference, hosted by UCL, for the first time. Orbyts is an education programme in which secondary school pupils work on original research projects under the tuition of PhD students, Post-Docs and other young scientists.

Since February, our students have been working with an Astrophysics PhD candidate from UCL on a project exploring the impact of galactic magnetic fields on star formation. Their results are that galactic magnetic fields squish ionized gas down into a disc, where the electric repulsion of the ions hinders further collapse. This might be why stellar formation is inefficient. As part of the project, students used python to extract and analyse data from the JCMT telescope in Hawaii, plot magnetic fields vectors against thermal images of forming stars. At the conference, our Dolphins presented their work to students from seven other schools, as well as other UCL researchers.