OFFICE workers in Wiltshire have helped a team of Scottish and French astronomers discover a festive star that does the twist.
Funding for the pioneering work has come from officials working at the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the UK's strategic science investment agency, based in a modest office behind Swindon railway station.
They have given grants for the project involving astronomers from the University of St Andrew's and the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees, Toulouse.
The experts have been in Australia discovering the new phenomenon of twisting in which there is a change in the way the star spins on its axis.
This twisting behaviour has been predicted by some theories of the way in which stars generate their magnetic fields, but until now it has never been observed directly.
The discovery stems from a painstaking analysis of observations made annually since 1988 by Dr Andrew Collier Cameron of the University of St Andrews and Dr Jean-Francois Donati of the Observatoire Midi-Pyrenees in Toulouse. They have used a 3.9 metre Anglo-Australian Telescope.
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