Yesterday, students from LAE's AstroPhysics Club took a trip to Queen Mary University London for their annual CosmicCon event. The conference was a celebration of the culmination of Physics Research in School Environments (PRiSE) projects that schools including LAE have been working on over the past few weeks.

The PRiSE programme is run by QMUL's Department of Physics and Astronomy and offers school students the opportunity to experience authentic scientific research within their school, supported by active researchers from the university.

One LAE group won the best poster presentation prize, for the Planet-Hunting Wtih Python project. Year 12 physicists Arjun, Mateo, Safin and Abdul worked as a team on the presentation which was commended by the judges.

All five teams worked very hard on their projects, and did a fantastic job of learning to use Python coding skills to analyse data from the Kepler and Tess spacecraft and identify the orbital parameters of exoplanets fomr a range of star systems. They then produced posters summarising and communicating their findings and three groups presented their posters in person at the conference, at QMUL's Mile End campus.

The teams have been working on their projects in their weekly AstroPhysics Club this term, which students have enjoyed as a chance to explore aspects of astrophysics beyond their Physics A-level curriculum, as well as develop skills such as Python coding.

The LAE Physics department is grateful to the QMUL Department of Physics and Astronomy for this opportunity to experience and take part in real scientific research at a world-class university.