HiPACC Computational Astronomy Press Room Archive
The Press Room Archive highlights computational astronomy work around the UC-HiPACC consortium; the wording of the short summaries on this page is based on wording in the individual releases or on the summaries on the press release page of the original source. Press releases below appear in reverse chronological order (most recent first); they can also be displayed by UC campus or DOE lab by clicking on the desired venue at the bottom of the left-hand column. This page is the archive. Click for current computational astronomy press releases.
October 9, 2014 — UC Riverside’s ‘Alternative Earths’ team selected to join the NASA Astrobiology Institute
Artist concept of an early Earth. Credit: NASA
UCR 10/9/2014—How can astronomers looking at Mars or planets in distant solar systems tell whether they support life? Researchers at UC Riverside will share a $50 million grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute to help answer that question by studying ancient rocks on Earth to determine how oxygen developed in our atmosphere billions of years ago. Specifically, UCR’s team will spend five years trying to map the different states of life on Earth from 3.2 billion years ago—when bacteria may have first begun oxygen-producing photosynthesis—to about 700 million years ago, about the time animals came on the scene, said UCR Distinguished Professor of Biogeochemistry Timothy Lyons, leader of the “Alternative Earths” team. “The question is, what can we learn from early Earth to inform our exploration of life in the universe?” Lyons said. Specifically, if you were observing Earth from light-years away 3 billion years ago, what kind of evidence would confirm that our planet was habitable, and in fact teeming with life?
October 9, 2014 — Astronomers analyze atmosphere of planet orbiting another star
Exoplanet WASP-43b is a world of extremes, where seething winds howl at the speed of sound from a 3,000-degree-Fahrenheit day side, hot enough to melt steel, to a pitch-black night side with temperatures below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Credit: NASA/STScI
UCSC 10/9/2014—The atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star has been mapped in unprecedented detail using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The map provides information about temperatures at different layers of the world’s atmosphere and traces the amount and distribution of water vapor on the planet. The findings have ramifications for the understanding of atmospheric dynamics and the formation of giant planets like Jupiter. The planet, called WASP-43b, is 260 light-years away. About the same size as Jupiter, it is nearly twice as massive. The planet is so close to its orange dwarf host star that it completes an orbit in just 19 hours. The planet is also gravitationally locked so that it keeps one hemisphere facing the star, just as our moon keeps one face toward Earth. Jonathan Fortney, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and postdoctoral researcher Mike Line did most of the theoretical work and modeling of the planet's atmosphere, now presented in two new papers, one published online in Science on October 2 and the other published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on September 12.
October 9, 2014 — Dead star shines on
High-energy X-rays streaming from a rare and mighty pulsar (magenta), the brightest found to date, can be seen in this new image of a galaxy called Messier 82 (M82), or the “Cigar galaxy,” combining multi-wavelength data from three telescopes. The bulk of M82 is seen in visible light captured by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s 2.1-meter telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona. Starlight is white, and lanes of dust appear brown. Low-energy X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in blue, and higher-energy X-rays from NuSTAR are pink.
LLNL 10/9/2014—A supernova is the cataclysmic death of a star, but its remnants shine on. Astronomers have found a pulsating, dead star beaming with the energy of about 10 million suns. This is the brightest pulsar—a dense stellar remnant leftover from a supernova—ever recorded, and was seen using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers were involved in the design and testing of the NuSTAR X-ray optics. Like black holes, neutron stars are the burnt-out cores of exploded stars, but puny in mass by comparison. Pulsars are neutron stars that send out beams of light. As the star spins, these beams intercept Earth-like lighthouse beacons, producing a pulsed signal. NuSTAR’s discovery of the massive pulsar is helping astronomers better understand mysterious sources of extreme X-rays, called ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). Before now, all ULXs were thought to be actively feeding black holes. This NuSTAR finding, published in in the Oct. 9 issue of Nature, shows that at least one ULX, about 12 million light-years away in a galaxy called Messier 82 (M82), is not a black hole but a pulsar.
October 2, 2014 — Astronomer Claire Max appointed interim director of UC Observatories
Claire Max
UCSC 10/2/2014—The University of California has appointed Claire Max, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, to serve as director of UC Observatories on an interim basis while an international search is conducted to appoint a permanent director. Max succeeds Sandra Faber, whose two-year appointment as interim director ended in June. Max is internationally known for her research in plasma physics, astronomy, and astronomical instrumentation. A pioneer in the field of adaptive optics, she has served as director of the Center for Adaptive Optics at UC Santa Cruz. UC Observatories (UCO) is a multicampus research unit headquartered on the UC Santa Cruz campus. UCO operates the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton and the UCO Technical Labs at UC Santa Cruz and UCLA, and is a managing partner of the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. UCO is also the center for UC's participation in the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) project.
October 2, 2014 — Funding for big-data projects in ecology, astronomy & microscopy
New microscopy tools: Wide field-of-view, high resolution image of dog cardiac tissue section taken by the Computational Imaging Lab.
UCB/BIDS 10/2/2014—Joshua Bloom wants to train computers to be surrogate astronomers so they can discover new celestial phenomena within the streaming torrent of data from telescopes. He is one of three professors at UC Berkeley will receive $1.5 million over the next five years from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation as part of the foundation’s Data-Driven Discovery Initiative. Bloom, a professor of astronomy and head of the campus’s Center for Time Domain Informatics, has pioneered the use of machine learning in astronomy. He and his students teach computers to sift and analyze data, ideally in real time, to pick out anomalies that may signal new and weird cosmic phenomena—from explosive events in space to unusual variable stars. Machine learning techniques he has applied to data from the Palomar Transient Factory have produced 65 papers so far. As a Moore Investigator in Data-Driven Discovery, Bloom will be able to collaborate with statisticians and computer scientists to explore machine learning more thoroughly, and find ways to expand into other fields, such as particle physics, where large amounts of data are typical.
October 2, 2014 — A closer look at the perfect fluid
A simulated collision of lead ions. Credit: ALICE experiment at CERN
LBNL 10/2/2014—By accelerating heavy atomic nuclei to high energies and blasting them into each other, scientists are able to recreate the hot temperature conditions of the early universe. By combining data from two high-energy accelerators, nuclear scientists have refined the measurement of a remarkable property of exotic matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Relying on a branch of theory called relativistic hydrodynamics in which the motion of fluids is described by equations from Einstein’s theory of special relativity, researchers from the JET Collaboration have developed such a model that can describe the process of expansion and the observed phenomena of an ultra-hot perfect fluid, allowing them to understand how jets propagates through the dynamic fireball. The findings reveal new aspects of the ultra-hot, “perfect fluid” that give clues to the state of the young universe just microseconds after the big bang. The multi-institutional JET Collaboration, led by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL), published their results in Physical Review C.
October 1, 2014 — Hide & seek: Sterile neutrinos remain elusive
Photomultiplier tubes in the Daya Bay detectors. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/LBNL
LBNL 10/1/2014—The Daya Bay Collaboration, an international group of scientists studying the subtle transformations of neutrinos—electrically neutral, almost undetectable subatomic particles—has published its first results on the search for a so-called sterile neutrino, a possible new type of neutrino beyond the three known neutrino “flavors,” or types. The existence of elusive sterile neutrinos, if proven, would have a profound impact on our understanding of the universe, and could impact the design of future neutrino experiments. The new results, published in Physical Review Letters, show no evidence for sterile neutrinos in a previously unexplored mass range. The fact that neutrinos have mass at all is a relatively new discovery, as is the observation at Daya Bay that the electron neutrino is a mixture of at least three mass states. While scientists don’t know the exact values of the neutrino masses, they are able to measure the differences between them, or “mass splittings.” They also know that neutrinos are dramatically less massive than the well-known electron, though both are members of the family of particles called “leptons.” Their unexpected observations have led to the possibility that the neutrino could be a special type of matter and a very important component of the mass of the universe.
September 29, 2014 — Simulations reveal unusual death for ancient stars
This image is a slice through the interior of a supermassive star of 55,500 solar masses along the axis of symmetry. It shows the inner helium core in which nuclear burning is converting helium to oxygen, powering various fluid instabilities (swirling lines). This snapshot from a CASTRO simulation shows one moment a day after the onset of the explosion, when the radius of the outer circle would be slightly larger than that of the orbit of the Earth around the sun. Visualizations were done in VisIT. Credit: Ken Chen
NERSC/UCSC 9/29/2014—Certain primordial stars with masses tens of thousands of times that of the Sun may have exploded as supernovae and burned completely, leaving no remnant black hole behind. First-generation stars fused the first chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium; in death, they sent their chemical creations into space, paving the way for subsequent generations of stars, solar systems and galaxies. Postdoctoral researcher Ke-Jung Chen at UC Santa Cruz and his colleagues used a one-dimensional stellar evolution code called KEPLER to model the life of a primordial supermassive star. They found that such a star lived only a fast 1.69 million years before general relativistic effects caused it to become unstable and start to collapse. As the star collapsed, it rapidly synthesized heavy elements like oxygen, neon, magnesium and silicon starting with helium in its core. That process released more energy than the binding energy of the star, halting the collapse and causing a massive explosion: a supernova. In a narrow window of mass between 55,000 to 56,000 solar masses, it could explode completely instead of becoming a supermassive black hole. That mechanism was never before found. Their findings were published in Astrophysical Journal.
NERSC release: http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/science-news/2014/simulations-reveal-unusual-death-for-ancient-stars/ ; UCSC release: http://news.ucsc.edu/2014/09/unusual-supernova.html
NERSC release: http://www.nersc.gov/news-publications/news/science-news/2014/simulations-reveal-unusual-death-for-ancient-stars/ ; UCSC release: http://news.ucsc.edu/2014/09/unusual-supernova.html
September 4, 2014 — Edward Moses to lead Giant Magellan Telescope Organization
Ed Moses
LLNL 9/4/2014—Ed Moses, a longtime scientific leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has been appointed by the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) as president of their organization, effective Oct. 2, 2014. The GMTO is a major international collaboration to build a billion-dollar, 25-meter telescope, located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. The GMT will be significantly larger than any telescope in existence today. It will be used to discover and characterize planets around other stars (including the search for telltale signs of life), to probe the formation of stars and galaxies shortly after the Big Bang, to measure the masses of black holes and to explore fundamental issues in cosmology and physics, including dark matter and dark energy. The giant telescope is expected to come on line early in the next decade.
August 31, 2014 — Mixing in star-forming clouds explains why sibling stars look alike
Image from a computer simulation show the collision of two streams of interstellar gas, leading to gravitational collapse of the gas and the formation of a star cluster at the center. The image shows the density of interstellar gas (redder indicates greater density). Watch video at https://vimeo.com/104368279 (Credit: Y. Feng and M. Krumholz)
UCSC 8/31/2014—The chemical uniformity of stars in the same cluster is the result of turbulent mixing in the clouds of gas where star formation occurs, according to a study by astrophysicists at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their results, published August 31 in Nature, show that even stars that don't stay together in a cluster will share a chemical fingerprint with their siblings which can be used to trace them to the same birthplace. The new study suggests that astronomers could potentially find the sun's long-lost siblings even if they are now on the opposite side of the galaxy.
August 31, 2014 — Why sibling stars look alike: Early, fast mixing in star-birth clouds
Two 11-second movies shows a computational simulation of a collision of two converging streams of interstellar gas, leading to collapse and formation of a star cluster at the center. Credit: Mark Krumholz
UC-HiPACC 8/31/2014—Early, fast, turbulent mixing of gas within giant molecular clouds—the birthplaces of stars—means all stars formed from a single cloud bear the same unique chemical “tag” or “DNA fingerprint,” writes computational astronomers at University of California, Santa Cruz in the journal Nature, published online on August 31, 2014. Could such chemical tags help astronomers identify our own Sun’s long-lost sibling stars?
August 4, 2014 — Funds awarded to begin construction of Large Synoptic Survey Telescope
The 8.4-meter LSST will use a special three-mirror design, creating an exceptionally wide field of view. Credit: LSST/rendering
UCD 8/4/2014—The National Science Foundation has agreed to support the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy to manage the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) construction project, with a budget of up to $473 million. The LSST is designed to image the entire night sky every three nights for 10 years, producing 15 terabytes of data per night. Project designers aim to have this data freely available online within a minute of imaging. The telescope is expected to see "first light" in 2019 and begin full science operations in 2022. LSST will allow astronomers to detect comets, asteroids, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and other fast-moving or changing objects. It will give insight into the beginnings of the solar system, map the distribution of dark matter, and give insights into “dark energy,” the mysterious force that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.
July 30, 2014 — Tidal forces gave moon its shape, according to new analysis
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera acquired this image of the nearside of the moon in 2010. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University
UCSC 7/30/2014—The shape of the moon deviates from a simple sphere in ways that scientists have struggled to explain. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that most of the moon's overall shape can be explained by taking into account tidal effects acting early in the moon's history. The results, published July 30 in Nature, provide insights into the moon's early history, its orbital evolution, and its current orientation in the sky.
July 29, 2014 — Mercury’s magnetic field tells scientists how its interior is different from Earth’s
Mercury, with colors enhanced to emphasize the chemical, mineralogical and physical differences among the rocks that make up its surface. Credit: NASA
UCLA 7/29/2014—Mercury’s magnetic field is bizarre: it is approximately three times stronger at its northern hemisphere than at its southern one, revealed measurements from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft. A team led by Hao Cao, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar working in the laboratory of Christopher T. Russell, created a mathematical model to explore how the dynamics of Mercury’s core contribute to this unusual phenomenon. Among factors Hao and his colleagues considered were how fast Mercury rotates and the chemistry and complex motion of fluid inside the planet. The planetary physicists found Mercury’s asymmetric magnetic field provides evidence that iron turns from a liquid to a solid at the core’s outer boundary. Their research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
July 28, 2014 — Cassini finds 101 geysers and more on icy Saturn moon
A mosaic of high resolution images from the Cassini mission shows geysers erupting from the frozen surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA/JPL/CICLOPS
UCSC 7/28/2014—Scientists on NASA’s Cassini mission have identified 101 distinct geysers erupting on Saturn's small, icy moon Enceladus and uncovered critical clues to what powers them. Their results, including the possibility that liquid water may be reaching all the way to the surface, are presented in two back-to-back articles published in the Astronomical Journal.
August 5, 2014 — Construction to begin in Hawaii on world’s most advanced telescope
TMT at night, artist’s conception. Credit: www.tmt.org
UCLA, 8/5/2014—With the recent approval of a sublease by Hawaii’s Board of Land and Natural Resources, initial construction on the Thirty Meter Telescope—destined to be the most advanced and powerful optical telescope in the world—can now begin later this year. The board's final go-ahead, received July 25, moves the University of California a step closer to peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before. Work on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), named for its 30-meter primary mirror—three times the diameter of the largest existing telescopes—will take place atop Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano. The TMT’s scientific operations are slated to start in 2022.
July 28, 2014 — Next-generation Thirty Meter Telescope to begin construction in Hawaii
Artist’s concept shows the TMT's segmented primary mirror, which has 492 hexagonal segments. Credit: TMT Observatory Corporation
UCSC 7/28/2014—Following the approval of a sublease on July 25 by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources, the construction phase of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project will begin on Hawaii Island and around the world throughout the TMT international partnership. The TMT International Observatory Board of Directors, the project’s new governing body, recently voted for the approval of the initial phase of construction, contingent on the approval of the sublease, with activities near the summit of Mauna Kea scheduled to start later this year.
July 17, 2014 — In search of elusive dark matter
Diagram shows a cross section of the LUX-Zeplin experiment, which when constructed will be the largest dark matter detector in the world, holding 7 tons of liquid xenon.
UCSB 7/17/2014—While scientists have long known that dark matter exists, they have never been able to touch it. That could change, however, with the development of what might one day be the biggest and most capable dark matter experiment in the world. The Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) last week announced funding for the second-generation Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, dubbed LUX-ZEPLIN (ZonEd Proportional scintillation in LIquid Noble gases). UC Santa Barbara physics professor Harry Nelson is the scientific leader of the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) collaboration, and UCSB physicists, who led the design and building of LUX’s ultrapure water tank, will design a new element for LZ.
July 15, 2014 — Next-generation dark matter experiments get the green light
The LZ water shield, currently housing the LUX experiment.
LBNL 7/15/2014—Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Science Foundation announced support for a suite of upcoming experiments to search for dark matter that will be many times more sensitive than those currently deployed. These so-called Generation 2 Dark Matter Experiments include the LUX-Zeplin (LZ) experiment, an international collaboration formed in 2012, managed by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) and to be located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota. With the announcement, the DOE and NSF officially endorsed LZ and two other dark matter experiments.
July 17, 2014 — Peering into giant planets from in and out of this world
The interior of the target chamber at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The object entering from the left is the target positioner, on which a millimeter-scale target is mounted. Researchers recently used NIF to study the interior state of giant planets. Credit: Damien Jemison/LLNL
LLNL 7/17/2014—Using the largest laser in the world, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), teams from LLNL, UC Berkeley, and Princeton University squeezed samples to 50 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure, which is comparable to the pressures at the center of Jupiter and Saturn. In so doing, Lawrence Livermore scientists for the first time have experimentally re-created the conditions that exist deep inside giant planets, such as Jupiter, Uranus, and many of the planets recently discovered outside our solar system. Researchers can now re-create and accurately measure material properties that control how those planets evolve over time—information essential for understanding how these massive objects form. This study focused on carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the cosmos (after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen), which has an important role in many types of planets within and outside our solar system. The research appears in the July 17 edition of the journal, Nature.
July 8, 2014 — Small but plentiful: How the faintest galaxies illuminated the early universe
Video from the simulations, done using SDSC’s Trestles supercomputer and additional systems at NASA: Reionizing the Universe with Dwarf Galaxies.
SDSC 7/8/2014—Light from tiny galaxies more than 13 billion years ago played a larger role than bigger galaxies in creating the conditions in the universe as we know it today, according to a new study by researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego and at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Ultraviolet (UV) light from stars in these faint dwarf galaxies helped strip interstellar hydrogen of electrons in a process called reionization, the researchers said in a paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The epoch of reionization began about 200 million years after the Big Bang and astrophysicists agree that it took about 800 million more years for the entire universe to become reionized—the last major phase transition of gas in the universe (it remains ionized today). The team’s simulations modeled the flow of UV stellar light through the gas within galaxies as they formed. “That such small galaxies could contribute so much to reionization is a real surprise,” said Michael Norman, SDSC director and one of the co-authors.
June 30, 2014 — Astrophysicist Douglas Lin wins 2014 Brouwer Award
Douglas N. C. Lin
UCSC 6/30/2014—Douglas N. C. Lin, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, has been chosen to receive the 2014 Brouwer Award for outstanding contributions to the field of dynamical astronomy. The Brouwer award is bestowed annually by the Division on Dynamical Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. Lin is best known for his pioneering work on the origin and evolution of planetary systems. He has made fundamental contributions to the understanding of astrophysical disks, including protoplanetary disks (the disks of gas and dust from which planets form around stars), the rings of Saturn, spiral disk galaxies, and the accretion rings around black holes that power quasars.
August 31, 2014 — Why Sibling Stars Look Alike: Early, Fast Mixing in Star Birth Clouds
Two 11-second movies shows a computational simulation of a collision of two converging streams of interstellar gas, leading to collapse and formation of a star cluster at the center.
August 31, 2014 — Early, fast, turbulent mixing of gas within giant molecular clouds—the birthplaces of stars—means all stars formed from a single cloud bear the same unique chemical “tag” or “DNA fingerprint,” writes computational astronomers at University of California, Santa Cruz in the journal Nature, published online on August 31, 2014. Could such chemical tags help astronomers identify our own Sun’s long-lost sibling stars? Read the UC-HiPACC press release at http://hipacc.ucsc.edu/PressRelease/sibling-stars.html and watch the movies!
June 4, 2014 — Surprisingly strong magnetic fields challenge black holes’ pull
A computer simulation of gas (in yellow) falling into a black hole (too small to be seen). Twin jets are also shown with magnetic field lines. Image credit: Alexander Tchekhovskoy, LBNL
LBNL 6/4/14—A new study of 76 supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies has found that the black holes’ magnetic field strength matched the force produced by their powerful gravitational pull, says a team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, Germany. The findings, which systematically measure the strength of magnetic fields near black holes for the first time, are published in the June 5 issue of Nature. Computational models by Alexander Tchekhovskoy, postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, had suggested a black hole could sustain a magnetic field that was as strong as its gravity, but until this study there was not yet observational evidence to support this prediction. With the two forces balancing out, a cloud of gas caught on top of the magnetic field would be spared the pull of gravity and instead levitate in place. Tchekhovskoy says the new results mean theorists must re-evaluate their understanding of black-hole behavior.
May 21, 2014 — Confirmed: Stellar behemoth self-destructs in a Type IIb supernova
A very hot, young supernova (arrow) marked the explosive death of a massive star in a galaxy known as UGC 9379 about 360 million light years away from Earth.
LBNL 5/21/14 — For the first time ever, scientists have direct confirmation that a Wolf-Rayet star—sitting in a galaxy 360 million light years away in the constellation Boötes—died in a violent explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Wolf-Rayet stars are more than 20 times as massive as the Sun and at least five times as hot. They are relatively rare and often obscured by gas and dust, so scientists don’t know much about them. But now an innovative sky survey called the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)—which uses resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), both located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)—exposes fleeting cosmic events such as supernovae. Using the iPTF pipeline, researchers caught supernova SN 2013cu within hours of its explosion. “This is the smoking gun,” says Peter Nugent, who heads LBNL’s Computational Cosmology Center (C3) and leads the Berkeley contingent of the iPTF collaboration.
May 21, 2014 — Search for extraterrestrial intelligence gets hearing on Hill
The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico
UCB 5/21/14 — UC Berkeley operates the longest-running search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as well as the popular crowd-sourced computing project SETI@home. At the invitation of committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), Dan Werthimer, who directs UC Berkeley’s new SETI Research Center, and astrobiologist Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., described current projects to find intelligent life on other planets and how NASA’s Kepler space observatory is contributing to this effort at a May 21 hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. They also reviewed new projects, such as “eavesdropping SETI,” and the latest tools, including the Allen Telescope Array in northern California now operated by the SETI Institute. Werthimer’s searches have piggybacked on the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico, the world’s largest radio telescope. They now plan a broad effort dubbed the Panchromatic SETI Project, to observe the planets around all 30 stars within 13 light years of Earth in the northern hemisphere: the UC Berkeley collaborators will harness six different ground-based telescopes, including Arecibo, Green Bank and the Keck telescopes in Hawaii, to look for optical, infrared and radio signals simultaneously and for more extended periods of time.
May 21, 2014 — Astronomer Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz wins fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz (Photo by Elena Zhukova)
UCSC 5/21/14 — Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, is among a select group of 50 artists and scholars who will be spending the 2014–2015 academic year as fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. As the Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow, Ramirez-Ruiz will pursue his research in theoretical astrophysics while part of a vibrant multidisciplinary community. The Radcliffe Fellowship Program brings together people from around the world to work on individual projects in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. Throughout the year, these scholars, scientists, and artists share their ideas with one another and the public through presentations, lectures, concerts, and exhibitions. Ramirez-Ruiz is developing the conceptual framework needed to understand the violent and capricious nature of the universe. He uses computer simulations to explore transient phenomena such as collisions, mergers, and disruptions of stars, especially those involving compact objects like black holes, neutron stars, and white dwarfs.
May 16, 2014 — Astronomer Harland Epps honored by Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Harland Epps
UCSC 5/16/14 — The Astronomical Society of the Pacific has honored Harland Epps, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, with the Maria and Eric Muhlmann Award for important research results based on development of groundbreaking instruments and techniques. Epps is a pioneer of astronomical optics, whose innovative designs allow deep imaging surveys and spectroscopy of very faint targets. His work has influenced almost every major telescope in the world and facilitated the modern explosive growth of data in astronomy. Instruments Epps has designed are currently on the Keck Telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii; the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) at the Whipple Observatory in Arizona; the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile; the Gemini Telescopes in Hawaii and Chile; and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.
May 15, 2014 — Giant telescope tackles orbit and size of exoplanet
LLNL researchers and international collaborators have refined estimates of the orbit and size of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b.
LLNL 5/15/14 — Using one of the world’s largest telescopes, a team from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and international collaborators have tracked the orbit of a planet at least four times the size of Jupiter. The scientists were able to identify the orbit of the exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, which sits 63 light years from our solar system, by using the Gemini Planet Imager’s next-generation, high-contrast adaptive optics (AO) system dubbed “extreme AO.” GPI is the first fully optimized planet imager, designed from the ground up for exoplanet imaging and deployed on one of the world’s biggest telescopes, the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile.
May 1, 2014 — Hubble astronomers check the prescription of a cosmic lens
The heart of a vast cluster of galaxies called MACS J1720+35 is shown in this image, taken in visible and near-infrared light by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy cluster is so massive that its gravity distorts, brightens, and magnifies light from more-distant objects behind it, an effect called gravitational lensing. Credit: NASA and ESA
UCB 5/1/14 — Two teams of astronomers working independently have discovered three supernovae (exploding stars) far behind massive clusters of galaxies. Their light was amplified and brightened by the immense gravity of the foreground clusters in a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Luckily, two and possibly all three of the supernovae appear to be Type Ia supernovae, prized by astronomers because they provide a consistent level of peak brightness that makes them reliable for making distance estimates. Because astronomers can estimate the intrinsic brightness of the Type Ia supernovae, they can independently measure the magnification of their images. The observed amplification and bending of light from sources behind the cluster plus theoretical models then allows them to develop maps that estimate the location and amount of dark matter in the cluster. Such maps “yield measurements of the cluster masses, allowing us to probe the cosmic competition between gravity and dark energy as matter in the universe gets pulled into galaxy clusters,” explained Supernova Cosmology Project leader Saul Perlmutter of the E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and UC Berkeley.
April 17, 2014 — Clocking the early universe’s expansion
As light travels to us from very distant quasars (white dots on the right), it passes through the expanding universe, carrying with it the story of its journey through this cosmic web. Astronomers have measured the expansion of the universe by tracing how quasar light has passed through these structures. (Illustration by Paul Hooper at Spirit Design with Mat Pieri and Gongbo Zhao, ICG; Courtesy: Third Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
LBNL 4/17/14 — Astronomers have made the most accurate calculation yet of the expansion rate of the young Universe with help from supercomputers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Their findings could help scientists discover the nature of dark energy, the mysterious, repulsive force that pervades our universe causing it to expand at an accelerating rate. By analyzing the light of distant quasars gathered by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), two teams of scientists found the 4 billion year-old Universe was expanding by one percent every 44 million years.
April 7, 2014 — BOSS quasars track the expanding universe—the most precise measurement yet
An artist’s conception of how BOSS uses quasars to measure the distant universe. Light from distant quasars is partly absorbed by intervening gas, which is imprinted with a subtle ring-like pattern of known physical scale. Astronomers have now measured this scale with an accuracy of two percent, precisely measuring how fast the universe was expanding when it was just 3 billion years old. (Illustration by Zosia Rostomian, LBNL, and Andreu Font-Ribera, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, LBNL)
LBNL 4/7/14 —The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), pioneered the use of quasars to map density variations in intergalactic gas at high redshifts, tracing the structure of the young universe. BOSS charts the history of the universe’s expansion to illuminate the nature of dark energy, and new measures of large-scale structure have yielded the most precise measurement of expansion since galaxies first formed. The latest quasar results combine two separate analytical techniques, one of which is a new kind of analysis led by physicist Andreu Font-Ribera of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). Together, the techniques establish the expansion rate at 68 kilometers per second per million light years at redshift 2.34, with an unprecedented accuracy of 2.2 percent.
April 7, 2014 — Orbital physics is child’s play with Super Planet Crash
This screenshot from the online game Super Planet Crash shows a six-planet system.
UCSC 4/7/14 — In a new online game Super Planet Crash, players build their own planetary system, putting planets into orbit around a star and racking up points until they add a planet that destabilizes the whole system. The addictive little game is driven by highly sophisticated software code that astronomers use to find exoplanets: planets beyond our solar system. The online release of Super Planet Crash follows the release of the latest version of Systemic Console, a scientific software package used to pull planet discoveries out of the reams of data acquired by telescopes such as the Automated Planet Finder (APF) at the University of California's Lick Observatory. An educational program, Systemic Live, provides simplified tools that students can use to analyze real data.
April 4, 2014 — Heliophysics modeling and simulation website debuts
Coronal mass ejection observed by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, in extreme ultraviolet radiation emitted by ionized helium atoms heated to 80,000 Kelvin. The eruption is caused by a magnetic field that was generated by a dynamo process beneath the physical surface of the sun. (NASA/SDO)
NASA Ames 4/4/14 —The science community has long understood that solar activity is caused by magnetic fields generated deep inside the Sun. Solar variability is a leading factor in determining space weather, which has a great impact on Earth’s environment and modern human activities (including electronics and telecommunications). The Heliophysics Modeling and Simulation (HMS) project team is developing high-fidelity modeling and simulation tools that enable research on the interiors and atmospheres of the Sun and other stars. The HMS project supports NASA’s Living With a Star Program goal to provide a predictive understanding of the Sun’s system, specifically of the space weather conditions near Earth and in the interplanetary medium.
April 1, 2014 — Misleading mineral may have led to overestimate of water in moon
Credit:UCLA
UCLA 4/1/14 —The amount of water present in the Moon may have been overestimated by scientists studying the mineral apatite, says a team of researchers led by Jeremy Boyce of the UCLA Department of Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. Boyce and his colleagues created a computer model to accurately predict how apatite would have crystallized from cooling bodies of lunar magma early in the Moon’s history. Their simulations revealed that the unusually hydrogen-rich apatite crystals observed in many lunar rock samples may not have formed within a water-rich environment, as was originally expected. This study, published in Science, shows that scientists still have much to learn about the composition and environment of the early Moon.
March 25, 2014 — Lick’s Automated Planet Finder: First robotic telescope for planet hunters
The Automated Planet Finder (APF) is the newest telescope at UC's Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. (Photo by Laurie Hatch)
UCB/UCSC 3/25/14 – Lick Observatory’s newest telescope, the Automated Planet Finder (APF), has been operating robotically night after night on Mt. Hamilton since January, searching nearby stars for Earth-sized planets. Every night the fully autonomous system checks the weather, decides which stars to observe, and moves the telescope from star to star throughout the night, collecting measurements that will reveal the presence of planets (UCSC astronomer Steve Vogt shows how the telescope works in this short video “How To Discover Habitable Planets” ). The APF is not only the first robotic planet-finding facility but also one of the most sensitive.
March 19, 2014 — Astrophysics team simulates key supernova phase at unprecedented resolution
The color map shows the magnitude of vorticity (the spinning motion of the fluid), with large regions of relatively strong turbulence shown in white/yellow. More at full iSGTW press release.
March 19, 2014 – UCSC/LBNL 3/19/14 - Type Ia supernovae, thermonuclear explosions of compact stars, start their explosion off-center, according to UC Santa Cruz postdoctoral researcher Chris Malone. He and other members of the astrophysics team led by professor Stan Woosley, used computational methods on the Blue Waters supercomputer to follow the evolution of these massive explosions, simulating a turbulent flame in a supernova at unprecedented resolution. Their results appear in the February 2014 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
March 18, 2014 — Setting a trap for gravity waves
B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation exhibits a distinctive 'curl,' either left or right-handed, imposed by the distortion of space as gravity waves moved through it. (Image BICEP2 Collaboration)
LBNL 3/18/14 – In 1996, Uros Seljak (then a postdoc at Harvard, now a professor of astrophysics at UCB) was contemplating ways to extract information from the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The distribution of slight temperature differences in the CMB had much to say about the large-scale structure of the universe. If it were also possible to detect the polarization of the CMB itself, however, a much wider window would be opened – polarization could even reveal the tracks of gravitational waves. On Monday, March 17, 2014, the BICEP2 collaboration grabbed the brass ring: first detection of B-mode polarization from gravitational waves, thus first direct evidence of inflation – a signal far stronger than most scientists had expected.
March 18, 2014 — Fierce solar magnetic storm barely missed Earth in 2012
Video in UCB press release shows a coronal mass ejection (CME) on the sun from July 22, 2012, at 10:00 p.m. EDT until 2 a.m. on July 23, as captured by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-Ahead (STEREO A). Because the CME headed in STEREO A’s direction, it appears like a giant halo around the sun.
UCB 3/18/14 – Earth dodged a huge magnetic bullet from the sun on July 23, 2012. According to University of California, Berkeley, and Chinese researchers, a rapid succession of coronal mass ejections — the most intense eruptions on the sun — sent a pulse of magnetized plasma barreling into space and through Earth’s orbit. Had the eruption come nine days earlier, when the ignition spot on the solar surface was aimed at Earth, it would have hit the planet, potentially wreaking havoc with the electrical grid, disabling satellites and GPS, and disrupting our increasingly electronic lives, potentially wreaking damage of up to $2.6 trillion worldwide. Read full UCB press release
March 10, 2014 — Possible evidence for dark matter particle presented at UCLA physics symposium
Mysterious dark matter makes up approximately 26 percent of the mass of the universe. At a major UCLA symposium attended by 190 scientists, physicists presented several analyses that participants interpreted to imply the existence of a dark matter particle. Credit: NASA/Hubble
UCLA 3/10/14 - Dark matter, the mysterious substance estimated to make up approximately more than one-quarter of the mass of the universe, is crucial to the formation of galaxies, stars and even life but has so far eluded direct observation.At a recent UCLA symposium attended by 190 scientists from around the world, physicists presented several analyses that participants interpreted to imply the existence of a dark matter particle. Read full UCLA press release
March 6, 2014 — Astronomers witness mysterious, never-before-seen disintegration of asteroid
This series of Hubble Space Telescope images reveals the breakup of an asteroid over a period of several months in late 2013.
UCLA 3/6/14 – Astronomers have witnessed for the first time the breakup of an asteroid into as many as 10 smaller pieces. Though fragile comet nuclei have been seen falling apart as they near the sun, nothing resembling this type of breakup has been observed before in the asteroid belt. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed the demolition. The discovery was published online March 6 in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Read full UCLA press release
March 3, 2014 — Standard-candle supernovae are still standard, but why?
Type Ia supernovae result from the explosions of white dwarf stars. These supernovae vary widely in peak brightness, how long they stay bright, and how they fade away, as the lower graph shows. Theoretical models (dashed black lines) seek to account for the differences, for example why faint supernovae fade quickly and bright supernovae fade slowly. A new analysis by the Nearby Supernova Factory indicates that when peak brightnesses are accounted for, as shown in the upper graph, the late-time behaviors of faint and bright supernovae provide solid evidence that the white dwarfs that caused the explosions had different masses, even though the resulting blasts are all “standard candles.”
LBNL 3/3/14 – Until recently, scientists thought they knew why Type Ia supernovae – the best cosmological “standard candles” – are all so much alike. But their favorite scenario was wrong. White dwarfs don’t all reach the Chandrasekhar limit, 1.4 times the mass of our sun, before they detonate in a massive thermonuclear explosion. Most Type Ia progenitors are less massive, and a few are even more massive. New work by the Berkeley Lab-based Nearby Supernova Factory with both models and observed light curves can identify which theories of the strange circumstances that lead to a Type Ia explosion actually work and which don’t. Read full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Press Release
February 27, 2014 — Closest, brightest supernova in decades is also a little weird
A color composite of SN 2014J, located in the “cigar galaxy” M82, 11.4 million light years away, made from KAIT images obtained through several different filters. The supernova is marked with an arrow. Other round objects are relatively nearby stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. (Image by W. Zheng and A. Filippenko, UC Berkeley)
UCB 2/27/14 – When supernova SN2014J was first noticed in January 2014 in the famous host galaxy M82, 11.4 million light years away in the Big Dipper, it was the closest and brightest supernova in decades. When UC Berkeley, astronomer Alex Filippenko’s research team looked for the supernova in data collected by the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory near San Jose, Calif., they found the robotic telescope had actually taken a photo of it just 37 hours after it appeared. Filippenko’s team also uncovered a mystery: the exploding star unexpectedly brightened faster than expected for Type Ia supernovae, which are used as a standard yardstick to measure vast distances across the cosmos. Read full UCB Press Release
21 February 2014 — NASA's IRIS Spots Its Largest Solar Flare
On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's newly-launched Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, observed its strongest solar flare to date.
NASA Ames 2/21/14 — On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission, which utilizes the Pleiades supercomputer to carry out numerical simulations, witnessed an M–class solar flare in late January, the largest flare the spacecraft viewed since its launch June 2013.
Read full NASA Ames press release. Includes video.
Read full NASA Ames press release. Includes video.
20 February 2014 — In Memoriam: Arthur M. Wolfe 1939-2014
Arthur M. Wolfe
UCSD 2/20/14 — Arthur M. Wolfe, an American astrophysicist who for a decade directed the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at UC San Diego and achieved widespread recognition for his discoveries about star formation and the early universe, died on February 17 following a battle with cancer in La Jolla, Calif. He was 74.
Read full UCSD press release
Read full UCSD press release
19 February 2014 — NuSTAR helps untangle how stars explode
The NuSTAR high-energy X-ray observatory captured this image of Cassiopeia A, a remnant that blew up as a supernova more than 11,000 years ago, leaving a dense stellar corpse and its ejected remains. Because the supernova was so far from Earth, the light only reached Earth about 350 years ago, when it may have appeared to be a new, bright star in the sky.
LLNL 2/19/14 — For the first time, an international team of astrophysicists, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists, have unraveled how stars blow up in supernova explosions. Using NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) -- a high-energy X-ray observatory -- the international collaboration created the first-ever map of radioactive material in a supernova remnant, named Cassiopeia A, or Cas A for short. The findings reveal how shock waves likely rip apart massive dying stars, and ultimately end their lives.
19 February 2014 — NuSTAR takes first peek into core of supernova
Stars fuse hydrogen (H) and helium (He) into heavier elements to produce energy, but once the reactions reach iron (Fe), fusion stops and the star implodes, creating a compact object – a neutron star or black hole – and blowing off the star’s outer layers in a supernova explosion. The explosion seeds the galaxy with elements like carbon (C) and oxygen (O) essential to life. NASA image.
UCB 2/19/14 — Astronomers for the first time have peered into the heart of an exploding star in the final minutes of its existence. “This has been a holy grail observation for high energy astrophysics for decades,” said coauthor and NuSTAR investigator Steven Boggs, UC Berkeley professor and chair of physics. “For the first time we are able to image the radioactive emission in a supernova remnant, which lets us probe the fundamental physics of the nuclear explosion at the heart of the supernova like we have never been able to do before.” The information will help astronomers build three-dimensional computer models of exploding stars, and eventually understand some of the mysterious characteristics of supernovae, such as jets of material ejected by some.
Read full UCB press release
Read full UCB press release
18 February 2014 — When a black hole shreds a star, a bright flare tells the story
UCSC 2/18/14 — Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz uses computer simulations to explore the universe's most violent events, so when the first detailed observations of a star being ripped apart by a black hole were reported in 2012, he was eager to compare the data with his simulations. He was also skeptical of one of the published conclusions: that the disrupted star was a rare helium star. "I was sure it was a normal hydrogen star and we were just not understanding what's going on," said Ramirez-Ruiz, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. In a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, Ramirez-Ruiz and his students explain what happens during the disruption of a normal sun-like star by a supermassive black hole, and why observers might fail to see evidence of the hydrogen in the star.
18 February 2014 — UCSC planetary scientist Ian Garrick-Bethell wins Sloan Research Fellowship
Ian Garrick-Bethell
UCSC 2/18/14 — The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship to Ian Garrick-Bethell, assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. The prestigious two-year fellowship includes a grant of $50,000 to support Garrick-Bethell's research, which focuses on how the moon developed its distinctive shape and topography. Sloan Research Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders. Garrick-Bethell's research has developed several new approaches to understand the moon's shape in the context of the effects of Earth tides early in the moon's history. He has also quantified how the moon's orientation to the Earth has changed since its formation.
Read full UCSC press release
Read full UCSC press release
January 19, 2014 — Distant quasar illuminates a filament of the cosmic web
This deep image shows the nebula (cyan) extending across 2 million light-years that was discovered around the bright quasar UM287. (Image: S. Cantalupo, UCSC)
UC Santa Cruz — Computer simulations suggest that matter in the universe is distributed in a “cosmic web” of filaments. Until now, these filaments have never been seen. Using the 10-meter Keck I Telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, however, UC Santa Cruz researchers detected a very large, luminous nebula of diffuse hydrogen gas extending about 2 million light-years across intergalactic space—equivalent to the distance between our Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy— revealing part of the network of filaments thought to connect galaxies in a cosmic web.
Read full UCSC press release
Read full UCSC press release
January 15, 2014 — Astrophysicist Piero Madau wins Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics
Piero Madau (Photo: C. Lagattuta)
UC Santa Cruz — Piero Madau, distinguished professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has been chosen to receive the 2014 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics, awarded jointly by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to recognize outstanding work in astrophysics. The prize honors Madau “for fundamental contributions to our understanding of the era of first light in the universe, the ionization and heating of the intergalactic medium, and the formation and evolution of galaxies.”
Read full UCSC press release
Read full UCSC press release
January 13, 2014 — World's most powerful planet-finder turns skyward with help from UCLA astronomers. First of 3 releases about GPI.
GPI's image of dust disk orbiting HR4796A
UCLA — he Gemini Planet Imager (GPI)—a powerful tool for studying dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars—is the most advanced instrument of its kind to be deployed on one of the world's biggest telescopes, the 8-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile. The GPI was designed and built to examine faint planets next to bright stars and probe their atmospheres. One of its major scientific components, the Integral Field Spectrometer (IFS), was built at UCLA's Infrared Laboratory for Astrophysics. The IFS detects infrared (heat) radiation from young planets in wide orbits around other stars, planets that are equivalent to giant planets in our own solar system not long after their formation.
Read full UCLA press release
Read full UCLA press release
January 7, 2014 — Out of this world first light images emerge from Gemini Planet Imager. Second of 3 releases about GPI.
GPI team during the first light run in November 2013.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — Probing the environments of distant stars in a search for planets has required the development of next-generation, high-contrast, extreme adaptive optics (AO), in which a deformable mirror is made of etched silicon, similar to microchips, rather than the large reflective glass mirrors used on other AO systems. The new mirror corrects for atmospheric distortions by adjusting its shape 1,000 times per second with accuracy better than 1 nanometer. Together with the other parts of Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), astronomers can directly image extra-solar planets that are 1 million to 10 million times fainter than their host stars.
View full Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release
View full Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory press release
January 7, 2014 — World's most powerful exoplanet camera looks skyward. Third of 3 releases about GPI.
The Gemini Planet Imager's first light image of Beta Pictoris b, a planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. (Image credit: Processing by Christian Marois, NRC Canada)
UC Santa Cruz — After nearly a decade of development at UC Santa Cruz and partner institutions, the world's most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds. The instrument, called the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), was designed, built, and optimized for imaging faint planets next to bright stars, probing their atmospheres, and studying dusty disks around young stars.
Read full UCSC press release
Read full UCSC press release
January 13, 2014 — Are Earths Rare? Perhaps Not
Artist’s representation of the “habitable zone,” the range of orbits where liquid water is permitted on the surface of a planet.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — One out of every five sun-like stars in our Milky Way galaxy has an Earth-sized planet orbiting it in the Goldilocks zone—not too hot, not too cold—where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a statistical analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. UC Berkeley scientists spent three years developing a transit search pipeline called TERRA that is optimized for finding small planets. When run on supercomputers to analyze nearly four years of Kepler observations, the scientists determined that our galaxy could contain as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-sized planets.
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
January 8, 2014 — BOSS Measures the Universe to One-Percent Accuracy
An artist's conception of the measurement scale of the universe. (Image: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey, has measured the clustering of nearly 1.3 million galaxies spectroscopically to determine the “standard ruler” of the universe’s large-scale structure to within one percent. This is the most precise such measurement ever made. Combined with recent measures of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) and supernova measures of accelerating expansion, the BOSS results suggest that dark energy is a cosmological constant whose strength does not vary in space or time. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), based at Berkeley Lab, was critical to the analysis.
Read full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
Read full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
January 7, 2014 — Hubble unveils a deep sea of small and faint early galaxies
An image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope of Abell 1689, a massive cluster of galaxies whose gravitational pull is so strong that it bends light, acting like a lens. (Photo: NASA and ESA; Space Telescope Science Institute)
UC Riverside — A team of scientists led by astronomers at UC Riverside has used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to uncover the long-suspected underlying population of galaxies that produced the bulk of new stars during the universe’s early years. The 58 young, diminutive galaxies, captured by Hubble deep exposures taken in ultraviolet light, are the smallest, faintest, and most numerous galaxies ever seen in the remote universe. These galaxies bolster claims that hot stars in small galaxies pumped out enough radiation to ionize hydrogen by stripping off electrons — a process called “reionization” that occurred about 13 billion years ago, within the first billion years after the Big Bang.
Read full UC Riverside press release
Read full UC Riverside press release
January 7, 2014 — UCSC astronomers discover ultra-bright young galaxies
Circled in this deep image are four extremely compact and bright galaxies so distant they are seen as they existed just 500 million years after the big bang.
UC Santa Cruz — An international team led by astronomers at UC Santa Cruz has discovered and characterized four surprisingly bright galaxies that are among the earliest and most distant galaxies ever observed. Based on image data gathered by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, the results show the galaxies as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, just 500 million years after the big bang. The galaxies are about 10 to 20 times more luminous than anything seen previously at this distance.
View full UCSC press release
View full UCSC press release
January 6, 2014 — Galaxy teems with sub-Neptune planets that are missing in our own solar system
More than three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have sizes ranging from that of Earth to that of Neptune, which is nearly four times as big as Earth. Such planets dominate the galactic census but are not represented in our own solar system. (Image: NASA Ames)
NASA Ames and UC Berkeley — UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy led a large team of Kepler space telescope scientists in analyzing high-precision Doppler data on newly discovered exoplanets, three-quarters of which are in a size range — larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune — that are common in our galaxy but mysteriously missing in our solar system.
View full NASA Ames press release
View full NASA Ames press release
December 18, 2013 — Scientists solve a decades-old mystery in the Earth's upper atmosphere
Schematic illustration of electron acceleration by “chorus”
UCLA — New research resolves decades of scientific controversy over the origin of the extremely energetic ultra-relativistic electrons in the Earth's near-space environment and is likely to influence our understanding of planetary magnetospheres throughout the universe. Understanding these mechanisms has important practical applications because this radiation can pose a significant hazard to satellites, spacecraft, and astronauts. The team’s detailed modeling demonstrates the remarkable efficiency of natural wave acceleration in the Earth's near-space environment.
View full UCLA press release
View full UCLA press release
December 18, 2013 — Powerful ancient explosions explain new class of supernovas
A small portion of one of the fields from the Supernova Legacy Survey showing SNLS-06D4eu and its host galaxy (arrow).
UC Berkeley — Astronomers Daniel Kasen of UC Berkeley and D. Andrew Howell of UC Santa Barbara, affiliated with the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), have discovered two of the brightest and most distant supernovae ever recorded, 10 billion light-years away and a hundred times more luminous than a normal supernova. These newly discovered supernovae are especially puzzling because the mechanism that powers most of them — the collapse of a giant star to a black hole or normal neutron star — cannot explain their extreme luminosity.
Read full UC Berkeley press release
Read full UC Berkeley press release
December 16, 2013 — Novel instrument probes close binary stars, may soon image exoplanets
Franck Marchis and colleague mount the FIRST instrument on the Shane 3-meter telescope at Lick Observatory.
UC Berkeley — A new instrument that combines two high-resolution telescope techniques — adaptive optics and interferometry — has for the first time imaged the individual stars in a nearby binary star system, demonstrating promise for eventually picking out planets that have been indistinguishable from the stars they orbit. The team, led by UC Berkeley assistant research astronomer Gaspard Duchêne, used a prototype instrument called the Fibered Imager foR Single Telescope (FIRST) that was mounted on the Shane 3-meter (120-inch) telescope at the University of California Lick Observatories on Mount Hamilton near San Jose.
View full UC Berkeley press release
View full UC Berkeley press release
December 16, 2013 — Supercomputers Capture Turbulence in the Solar Wind
Visualization zooms in on current sheets revealing the “cascade of turbulence” in the solar wind occurring down to electron scales. (Image: Burlen Loring, Berkeley Lab)
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — Strong magnetic storms on the Sun release tons of highly energetic particles into the solar wind. The Earth’s magnetic field bars most of these particles from plummeting through the atmosphere and damaging our DNA, debilitating power grids, disrupting communications networks, and damaging electronic devices. During particularly intense solar storms, however, the magnetosphere can “crack,” allowing charged particles to seep in and wreak havoc on the Earth’s technological infrastructure. Using supercomputers, LBL scientists simulated all the scales of solar wind turbulence at once—for the first time ever—to help scientists forecast destructive space weather.
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release
December 13, 2013 — Daniel Kasen among four young professors awarded Presidential early-career awards
UC Berkeley — Computational astrophysicist Daniel Kasen is one of four young UC Berkeley professors who were among 102 researchers named by President Obama as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. Kasen and the others will receive their awards at a Washington, DC, ceremony in the coming year.
View full White House press release
View full White House press release
December 12, 2013 — Big turnout for launch of big-data center
On hand to celebrate (left to right): Vice Chancellor for Research Graham Fleming, Moore Foundation’s Vicki Chandler, Chancellor Dirks and BIDS director Saul Perlmutter (Peg Skorpinski photo)
UC Berkeley — A newly announced Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) is designed to help researchers across the disciplines harness data in order to spur discoveries and create knowledge. This center for data-related teaching and collaboration will be housed in Doe Library. In a world now awash in data but short on the skills and tools needed to tap and share its riches effectively, advances in data science could help scholars “find what’s available and contribute” in unprecedented ways, said Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter, BIDS’s first director, at the inauguration ceremony.
View full UC Berkeley press release
View full UC Berkeley press release
December 10, 2013 — Astrophysicists launch ambitious assessment of galaxy formation simulations
Inconsistencies in supercomputer simulations to be compared in the AGORA project are clearly evident in this test galaxy produced by each of nine different versions of participating codes using the same astrophysics and starting with the same initial conditions.
UC Santa Cruz — Getting high-resolution computer simulations to produce realistic-looking galaxies has been a challenge and different codes (simulation programs) produce inconsistent results. Now, an international collaboration led by astrophysicists at UC Santa Cruz, aims to resolve these issues through an ambitious multi-year project named AGORA (Assembling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy). AGORA will run direct comparisons of different codes using a common set of initial conditions and astrophysical assumptions.
View full UCSC press release.
View full UCSC press release.
December 10, 2013 — Worldwide Collaboration Announces Project AGORA: Ambitious Comparison of High-Resolution Computer Simulations of Galaxy Formation and Evolution
Differences in supercomputer simulations to be compared in the AGORA project are clearly evident in this test galaxy produced by each of nine different versions of participating codes using the same astrophysics and starting with the same initial conditions.
A long-standing difficulty with supercomputer simulations of the formation and evolution of galaxies has been getting consistent results among different codes (programs) and with actual observations, so that computationally simulated galaxies look like real galaxies. While such conflicts could be evidence of complex physics in invisible dark matter, emerging evidence suggests that inconsistencies may originate from a poor understanding of processes involving ordinary matter as well as limitations in computational capability and differences in computer codes. Now, an ambitious new multiyear project—named AGORA, an ancient Greek word meaning meeting place, and an acronym for Assembling Galaxies of Resolved Anatomy—is under way to understand and resolve such inconsistencies.
view full press release
view full press release
December 6, 2013 — Neutron stars’ X-ray superbursts mystify, inspire Los Alamos scientists
A small, dense object only 12 miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula. (Image: NASA)
Massive X-ray superbursts near the surface of neutron stars are providing a unique window into the operation of fundamental forces of nature under extreme conditions. So much energy escapes by neutrino emission that the remaining energy released in the beta decays is not sufficient to ignite the X-ray superbursts that are observed. Thus the superbursts’ origin is a puzzle.
View full Los Alamos National Laboratory press release.
View full Los Alamos National Laboratory press release.
November 21, 2013 — Searching for Cosmic Accelerators via IceCube
Detectors of the IceCube neutrino observatory are buried more than a mile below the South Pole
In our universe there are particle accelerators 40 million times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Scientists don’t know what these cosmic accelerators are or where they are located, but new results being reported from IceCube, the neutrino observatory buried at the South Pole, may show the way.
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
View full Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory press release.
November 21, 2013 — Black hole birth captured by cosmic voyeurs
Telescope array (part of RAPTOR) captured the rare birth of a black hole in the constellation Leo
The RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) system is a network of small robotic observatories that scan the skies for optical anomalies such as flashes emanating from a star in its death throes as it collapses and becomes a black hole. An exceptionally bright flash of visible light that accompanied a powerful burst of cosmic gamma-ray emissions recently heralded the birth of a black hole in the constellation Leo. Already the event is testing some long-held assumptions about the nature of the universe.
View full Los Alamos National Laboratory press release.
View full Los Alamos National Laboratory press release.
November 21, 2013 — Evidence of jet of high-energy particles from Milky Way’s black hole found by astronomers
Sagittarius A* in the center of the Milky Way galaxy
For decades, astronomers have sought strong evidence that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is producing a jet of high-energy particles. Based on new results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array radio telescope, they now have it.
View full UCLA press release.
View full UCLA press release.
November 4, 2013 — Astronomers answer key question: How common are habitable planets?
UCB and UH authors find that 22% of Sun-like stars harbor a planet between one and two times the size of Earth in the habitable zone of orbits where liquid water can form on the surface of a planet.
UCB November 4, 2013 - UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii astronomers analyzed four years of Kepler space telescope data in search of Earth-size planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. They estimate that 22 percent of stars like the sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life.
View full UCB press release.
View full UCB press release.
October 30, 2013 — First Results from LUX, the World’s Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector
Inside the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter detector.
After its first run of more than three months, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, the new Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment has proven itself the most sensitive dark matter detector in the world. The international LUX scientific collaboration, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and DOE, comprises 17 research universities and national laboratories, including the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
view full LBL Press Release
view full LBL Press Release
October 30, 2013 — First results from LUX dark matter detector rule out some candidates
A mile underground, graduate student Jeremy Mock examines the xenon tank at the heart of the LUX dark matter detector.
Results from the first run of the LUX experiment, operating a mile underground in the Black Hills of South Dakota, have ruled out some possible candidates for a dark matter particle. "LUX is already producing the world's best results and excluding parameter space for a dark matter particle," said Matthew Szydagis, postdoctoral researcher in the physics department at the University of California, Davis, who is responsible for coordinating LUX data analysis.
view full UCD Press Release
view full UCD Press Release
October 30, 2013 — First Results from LUX, the World's Most Sensitive Dark Matter Detector
With 122 detector tubes, LUX is much more sensitive than its closest rival in the competitive field of dark-matter searches.
“Astronomers and astrophysicists have gold-plated proof that dark matter exists,” said University of California, Santa Barbara, physicist Harry Nelson, who helped design, build and fill the sophisticated water tank that houses the LUX experiment. “What we're trying to do is touch it here on Earth.”
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
October 29, 2013 — New Grad Program Dives into Emerging Fields of Big Data and Network Science
With funding from a recently granted $3 million Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award from the National Science Foundation, several co-principal investigators from a wide range of disciplines at University of California, Santa Barbara, have established a new graduate program focused on network science in the era of Big Data.
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
October 24, 2013 — Scientists Solve Mystery of Odd Patterns of Oxygen in Solar System’s Earliest Rocks
The earliest dust and rocks forming in the solar nebula. Credit: NASA.
Cosmochemists at the University of California, San Diego, have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.
view full SDSC Press Release
view full SDSC Press Release
October 23, 2013 — UC Riverside Astronomers Help Discover the Most Distant Known Galaxy
An artist's rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy z8-GND-5296.
Two University of California, Riverside astronomers are members of a team that has discovered the most distant galaxy ever found. The galaxy is seen as it was just 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only about 5 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.
view full UCR Press Release
view full UCR Press Release
October 21, 2013 — UC San Diego Researchers Advance Explanation for Star Formation
Projected density images resembling the inner structure of molecular clouds controlled by the turbulence that breaks the cloud into fragments, providing initial conditions for star formation. Simulation done using Kraken abnd Nautilus supercomputers at NICS.
Three University of California, San Diego astrophysics researchers for the first time provides an explanation for the origin of three observed correlations between various properties of molecular clouds in the Milky Way galaxy, known as Larson’s Laws. Their analysis is based on recent observational measurements and data from six supercomputer simulations of the interstellar medium, including effects of self-gravity, turbulence, magnetic field, and multiphase thermodynamics. Their study concludes that there are not three independent Larson laws, but that all three correlations are due to the properties of supersonic turbulence.
view full SDSC Press Release
view full SDSC Press Release
October 17, 2013 — Astronomers find most distant gravitational lens
The quadruple gravitational lens J1000+0221 is the most distant strong galaxy lens discovered to date.
University of California, Santa Cruz astronomers have found the most distant gravitational lens yet—a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The lensing mass is so distant that the light, after having been deflected, has traveled 9.4 billion years to reach us (the total age of the universe is 13.8 billion years). This is the second star-bursting dwarf galaxy found to be lensed. If such galaxies are much more common than previously thought, astronomers may be forced to rethink their models of galaxy evolution.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
October 17, 2013 — UCSC astrophysicist Charlie Conroy wins prestigious Packard Fellowship
Charlie Conroy (Photo by C. Lagattuta)
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has awarded a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering to Charlie Conroy, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
October 2, 2013 — Astronomers observe distant galaxy powered by primordial cosmic fuel
This image, an artist's impression based on a cosmological numerical simulation, shows a galaxy (center) with incoming cold gas flows, one of which is illuminated from behind by a distant quasar (lower left).
University of California, Santa Cruz astronomers have detected cold streams of primordial hydrogen, vestigial matter left over from the big bang, fueling a distant star-forming galaxy in the early universe. Profuse flows of gas onto galaxies are believed to be crucial for explaining an era 10 billion years ago, when galaxies were copiously forming stars.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
September 30, 2013 — Astronomers find patchy clouds on exotic world
The cloud map of Kepler-7b shows that clouds cover the western side of the gaseous planet, leaving the east cloud-free.
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes have created the first cloud map of a planet beyond our solar system, a sizzling, Jupiter-like world known as Kepler-7b. “These clouds may well be composed of rock and iron, since the planet is over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Jonathan Fortney, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and member of the Kepler science team.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
September 26, 2013 — Lunar orbiters discover source of space weather near Earth
Process of magnetic reconnection, which powers the phenomena known as space weather.
Solar storms—powerful eruptions of solar material and magnetic fields into interplanetary space—can cause what is known as “space weather” near Earth, resulting in hazards that range from interference with communications systems and GPS errors to extensive power blackouts and the complete failure of critical satellites. Researchers from University of California, Los Angeles, and two other institutions have measured the release of this magnetic energy close up using an unprecedented alignment of six Earth-orbiting spacecraft and NASA's first dual lunar orbiter mission, ARTEMIS.
view full UCLA Press Release
view full UCLA Press Release
September 25, 2013 — Simulating the big bang and beyond
Three of the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Labs—Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Argonne National Laboratory, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—have announced a partnership to develop a cosmological simulation analysis toolbox. The partnership seeks to take advantage of the DOE’s investments in supercomputers and high-performance computing codes, enhancing existing high-performance computing, high-energy physics, and cosmology-specific software systems to handle the large datasets of galaxy-formation simulations. The three labs are developing an open platform, web-based front end that will enable the scientific community to download, transfer, manipulate, search, and record simulation data. Astrophysicists will be able to upload and share applications as well as carry out complex computational analyses.
view full ISGTW Press Release
view full ISGTW Press Release
September 22, 2013 — UCLA scientists explain the formation of unusual ring of radiation in space
Model showing third radiation ring (red)
Since the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in 1958, space scientists have believed these belts encircling the Earth consist of two doughnut-shaped rings of highly charged particles: an inner ring of high-energy electrons and energetic positive ions and an outer ring of high-energy electrons. In February, a team of scientists reported the surprising discovery of a previously unknown third radiation ring: a narrow one that briefly appeared between the inner and outer rings in September 2012 and persisted for a month. Now, research geophysicists at University of California, Los Angeles performed simulations with a model of the Earth's radiation belts, which revealed that completely different populations of particles exist in space that change on different timescales, are driven by different physics, and show very different spatial structures.
view full UCLA Press Release
view full UCLA Press Release
September 19, 2013 — NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer Upgraded, Harpertown Nodes Repurposed
The Pleiades supercomputer was augmented with 46 SGI ICE X racks containing Intel Xeon E5-2680V2 (Ivy Bridge) processors, and runs at a theoretical peak of approximately 2.87 petaflops.
NASA Ames - System engineers in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division have upgraded the Pleiades supercomputer and repurposed its original hardware to help meet NASA's ever-increasing requirements for high-performance computing cycles. The newly configured system is capable of 61 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second) of peak performance.
view full NASA Ames Press Release
view full NASA Ames Press Release
September 18, 2013 — What’s next for NASA’s Kepler planet hunter
An artist’s rendition shows Kepler-62f, a “super-Earth” in the habitable zone of a star 1200 light-years from Earth.
NASA’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft may be permanently disabled by two broken gyroscope wheels, but researchers say the best results are yet to come. Using the processing power of the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames, Kepler researchers are exploring new ways to analyze four years of data that Kepler has collected since its launch in 2009. That analysis effort, which will incorporate new machine-learning techniques and a bit of human experimentation, could yield a bounty of new potential planets on top of the 3,500 that Kepler has found so far.
view full NASA Ames Press Release
view full NASA Ames Press Release
September 16, 2013 — Research project to capture infrared view of distant universe
The reflection of Brian Siana in the primary mirror of the Keck telescope. The telescopes’ mirrors are made of 36 hexagonal segments.
Astronomers at the University of California, Riverside have received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a very large new survey of galaxies using a new instrument — MOSFIRE — on the Keck I telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawai`i’s Big Island. The $975,000 grant for the MOSFIRE Deep Evolution Field (MOSDEF) Survey will be divided among four campuses: UC Riverside, UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. The survey will use the MOSFIRE instrument to obtain near-infrared spectra of nearly 2,000 galaxies as they were forming 9-12 billion years ago, ten times more than have been taken before. The spectra will allow the scientists to determine how quickly the galaxies are converting their gas into stars, how the supernovae of those stars enriched the galaxies with the heavier elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.), of which humans and Earth are made. It will accurately measure the obscuring effects of dust in the galaxies, and reveal the transition from nascent to mature galaxies during the epoch when most of the stars in the universe formed.
view full UCR Press Release
view full UCR Press Release
September 6, 2013 — Introducing NASA’s new quantum computing website
Support structure for installation of the D-Wave Vesuvius processor, which is cooled to 20 millikelvin (near absolute zero).
NASA's Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) is the space agency's hub for an experiment to assess the potential of quantum computers to perform calculations that are difficult or impossible using conventional supercomputers. NASA’s QuAIL team aims to demonstrate that quantum computing and quantum algorithms may someday dramatically improve the agency’s ability to solve difficult optimization problems for missions in aeronautics, Earth and space sciences, and space exploration. A new website for QuAIL provides an overview of the space agency’s vision for using quantum computing technologies, introduces the research team and their projects, and gives some information on the quantum computer housed in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility.
view full NASA Ames Press Release
view full NASA Ames Press Release
September 4, 2013 — It's a shock: Life on Earth may have come from out of this world
Comets contain elements such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide that could have supplied the raw materials, in which upon impact on early Earth would have yielded an abundant supply of energy to produce amino acids and jump start life.
A group of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher have confirmed that life really could have come from out of this world; from comets impacting the early Earth. Comets contain elements such as water, ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide that could have supplied the raw materials, and their impacts would have yielded an abundant supply of energy to produce amino acids and jump-start life. To test that scenario, the team shock-compressed an icy mixture similar to what is found in comets, a procedure that created a number of amino acids: the building blocks of life. This is the first experimental confirmation of what LLNL scientist Nir Goldman first predicted in 2010 and again in 2013 using computer simulations performed on LLNL's supercomputers Rzcereal and Aztec.
view full LLNL Press Release
view full LLNL Press Release
August 28, 2013 — New Cassini data from Titan indicate a rigid, weathered ice shell
Cassini captured this image of Saturn with it's largest moon, Titan, in the foreground on August 29, 2012.
An analysis of gravity and topography data from Saturn's largest moon, Titan, has revealed unexpected features of the moon's outer ice shell. The best explanation for the findings, the authors said, is that Titan's ice shell is rigid and that relatively small topographic features on the surface are associated with large roots extending into the underlying ocean.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
August 26, 2013 — NASA visualizations hit the Hyperwall
Researchers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division have a lot of processing power at their disposal, particularly with Pleiades: the space agency's most powerful supercomputer, the 9th fastest supercomputer in the United States, and 19th in the world. But when they need to explore data in different ways, they turn to hyperwall-2, a powerful collection of 128 LCD monitors that can show complex physical events in very high resolution. The visualizations that run on hyperwall-2 are critical to furthering NASA's scientific understanding of the universe. Powered by over 1,000 AMD Opteron cores and 128 NVIDIA GeFore GPUs, the hyperwall-2’s system is directly connected to the Pleiades supercomputer's filesystem and can display, process, and share data among each of the 128 screens, allowing endless configurations for analyzing data.
view full HPC Wire Press Release
view full HPC Wire Press Release
August 23, 2013 — A brighter method for measuring the surface gravity of distant stars
Simulations of granulation patterns on the surface of the Sun, sub-giant and giant stars.
Gibor Basri, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, has co-authored a study that reveals a clever new way of analyzing the flickering light from distant stars to determine the strength of gravity on their surfaces. A star’s surface gravity is one of the key properties that astronomers use to calculate a star’s physical properties and assess its evolutionary state. The new technique, developed by a Vanderbilt University-led team of astronomers, provides an easier, faster way to assess a star’s mass, size and other physical properties. There are three traditional methods for estimating a star’s surface gravity: photometric, spectroscopic and asteroseismic. The new flicker method is simpler than the older methods and more accurate than all but one of them. Plus it is remarkably simple – requiring only five lines of computer code to make the basic measurement – substantially reducing the cost and effort required to calculate the surface gravities of thousands of stars.
view full Vanderbilt Press Release
view full Vanderbilt Press Release
August 21, 2013 — New gamma-ray observatory begins operations at Sierra Negra volcano in the state of Puebla, Mexico
The HAWC Observatory taken in August 2013 from the summit of Sierra Negra.
The High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Gamma Ray Observatory has begun formal operations at its site in Mexico. HAWC is designed to study the origin of very high-energy cosmic rays and observe the most energetic objects in the known universe. “The HAWC observatory will search for signals from dark matter and to study some of the most extreme objects in the universe, such as supermassive black holes and exploding stars,” said Brenda Dingus, principal investigator and a research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
view full LANL Press Release
view full LANL Press Release
August 21, 2013 — New Results from Daya Bay – Tracking the disappearance of ghostlike neutrinos
Daya Bay’s detectors are immersed in the large water pools of the muon veto system.
New results about the oscillation of neutrinos – elusive, ghostlike particles that carry invaluable clues about the makeup of the early universe – have been announced by the Daya Bay Collaboration, an international experiment taking place outside of Hong Kong. The latest findings include the collaboration’s first data on how neutrino oscillation – in which neutrinos mix and change into other “flavors,” or types, as they travel – varies with neutrino energy, allowing the measurement of a key difference in neutrino masses known as mass splitting. Understanding the subtle details of neutrino oscillations and other properties of these shape-shifting particles may help resolve some of the deepest mysteries of our universe
view full LBL Press Release
view full LBL Press Release
August 21, 2013 — SCIPP director Steve Ritz helped ensure Fermi mission's scientific bounty
Steven Ritz, professor of physics and director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics
As project scientist for NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, Steven Ritz—professor of physics and director of the Stanta Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP)—had responsibility for scientific success of the mission, now entering its sixth year. Since its launch in June 2008, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has opened a new window on the high-energy universe, giving astrophysicists an unprecedented ability to study the exotic cosmic phenomena that emit gamma rays, the most energetic form of radiation.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
August 20, 2013 — New theory points to ‘zombie vortices’ as key step in star formation
Illustration of a protoplanetary disk based upon observations from the Keck II telescope.
UC Berkeley scientists have proposed a new model that elucidates a key step in star formation. They point to “zombie vortices” as a destabilizing force needed to help protostars accumulate the mass needed to grow into stars. A new theory by fluid dynamics experts at the University of California, Berkeley, shows how “zombie vortices” help lead to the birth of a new star. A team led by computational physicist Philip Marcus shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form.
view full UCB Press Release
view full UCB Press Release
August 7, 2013 — First Hundred Thousand Years of Our Universe
The microwave sky as seen by Planck. Mottled structure of the CMB, the oldest light in the universe, is displayed in the high-latitude regions of the map.
A new analysis of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation data by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has taken the furthest look back through time yet – 100 years to 300,000 years after the Big Bang – and provided tantalizing new hints of clues as to what might have happened.
view full LBL Press Release
view full LBL Press Release
August 6, 2013 — Royal Astronomical Society honors astronomer Sandra Faber
Sandra Faber
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) has awarded astronomer Sandra Faber an Honorary Fellowship of the RAS. Faber, a University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and interim director of UC Observatories, was recognized "for her extraordinary leadership in observational cosmology and galaxy formation, and for her community leadership."
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
August 1, 2013 — Mission to build world's most advanced telescope reaches major milestone
Artist's rendering of Thirty Meter Telescope
With the signing last week of a master agreement for the Thirty Meter Telescope — destined to be the most advanced and powerful optical telescope in the world — the University of California moved a step closer to peering deeper into the cosmos than ever before.
view full UCLA Press Release
view full UCLA Press Release
July 31, 2013 — UCSC acquires powerful new astrophysics supercomputer system
The Hyades astrophysics computer system, seen from the front (left) and back (right).
State-of-the-art computer systems have been instrumental in making UC Santa Cruz one of the world’s leading centers for computational astrophysics and planetary science. A new NSF-funded 'Hyades' supercomputer recently installed on campus provides an order of magnitude improvement in the ability of researchers to address fundamental questions in cosmology and astrophysics. Its value is further enhanced by a Huawei UDS petabyte storage system for data archiving and sharing the results of astrophysical simulations.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
July 29, 2013 — Scientific authorities sign TMT master agreement
Scientific authorities of the TMT partners signed the master agreement at a meeting in Hawaii.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project announced on Thursday, July 25, that all of the scientific authorities of the TMT partners have signed a master agreement, which establishes a formal relationship among the international parties defining the project goals, establishing a governance structure and defining member party rights, obligations and benefits.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
July 29, 2013 — IRIS Mission Gets First Look at Sun's Mysterious Interface Region
NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft has captured its first observations of the lowest layers of the Sun’s atmosphere in unprecedented detail. In combination with 3-D numerical simulations run on NASA's Pleiades supercomputer, IRIS will provide new insights into the dynamic magnetic structures and material flows within our sun.
view full NASA Ames Press Release
view full NASA Ames Press Release
July 29, 2013 — Quest to test Einstein’s speed limit
Dysprosium, a rare-earth element used in hard disk coatings, has an unusual electronic structure ideally suited to experiments like this.
Special relativity states that the speed of light is the same in all frames of reference and that nothing can exceed that limit. UC Berkeley physicists decided to test whether electrons abide by that limit, using a novel experimental system—the unusual electron orbitals of dysprosium.
view full UCB Press Release
view full UCB Press Release
July 25, 2013 — Van Allen probes pinpoint driver of speeding electrons
An artist's rendering of a mechanism within the Van Allen radiation belts that can accelerate electrons to satellite-killing energies.
Los Alamos researchers believe they have solved a lingering mystery about how electrons within Earth’s radiation belt can suddenly become energetic enough to kill orbiting satellites.
view full LANL Press Release
view full LANL Press Release
July 23, 2013 — Physics of Intrinsic Plasma Rotation Explained for First Time
Flamelets or hot spots along the plasma edge (a) drive turbulence intensity (b), temperature intensity (c), and intrinsic torque (d) inward, converting heat into toroidal rotation.
The quality of a fusion reaction is determined by plasma confinement at the edge, which is not yet completely understood. The SciDAC-developed XGC1 code, which was created using DOE NERSC supercomputers at Lawrence Berkely Laboratory, is the world’s first and only code able to simulate turbulence and background physics in realistic edge geometries.
view full NERSC Press Release
view full NERSC Press Release
July 19, 2013 — Tiny neutrino that could solve cosmic mystery is observed shifting form
A researcher stands inside the Super-Kamiokande detector where physicists have confirmed that they observed the changing of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos.
Scientists from Japan, UC Irvine and elsewhere today confirmed they have documented muon neutrinos transforming into electron neutrinos. The breakthrough could help explain “one of the most profound mysteries in science,” according to the group: why the universe is full of matter but not anti-matter.
view full UCI Press Release
view full UCI Press Release
July 8, 2013 — Saul Perlmutter: 'Science is about figuring out your mistakes'
Saul Perlmutter in his office at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.
The man who discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate reveals why he isn't afraid to fail. Writer Zoë Corbyn profiles Berkeley physicist and Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter in the July 6, 2013, issue of the UK’s The Guardian as part of a series on ‘rational heroes.’
view full The Guardian Press Release
view full The Guardian Press Release
July 5, 2013 — Feeding Galaxy Caught in Distant Searchlight by International Research Team
Artist’s impression of a galaxy accreting material from its surroundings.
An international group of astronomers that includes two UC Santa Barbara astrophysicists has spotted a distant galaxy hungrily snacking on nearby gas. The gas is seen to fall inward toward the galaxy, creating a flow that both fuels star formation and drives the galaxy's rotation. This is the best direct observational evidence so far supporting the theory that galaxies pull in and devour nearby material in order to grow and form stars.
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
July 1, 2013 — UCSB Astronomer Uncovers The Hidden Identity Of An Exoplanet
The relative size of the Earth and Sun next to those of HD 97658 (the star) and HD 97658b (the super-Earth exoplanet).
While the discovery of this particular exoplanet is not new, determining its true size and mass is, thanks to Diana Dragomir, with the UC Santa Barbara-affiliated Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network. As part of her research, Dragomir looked for transits of this exoplanet with Canada's Microvariability & Oscillations of Stars (MOST) space telescope.
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
June 30, 2013 — How did a third radiation belt appear in the Earth's upper atmosphere?
NASA's Van Allen probes
UCLA space scientists have determined what caused the mysterious ring to appear in the Van Allen radiation belts in September 2012 and then quickly dissipate.
view full UCLA Press Release
view full UCLA Press Release
June 25, 2013 — Astronomers detect three planets in habitable zone of nearby star
UCSC astronomer Steve Vogt (foreground) with collaborator Paul Butler at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Analysis of new and archived observations of a well-studied star known as Gliese 667C have revealed a system with at least six planets, including a record-breaking three super-Earths orbiting in the star's "habitable zone" where liquid water could exist on the planets. This is the first planetary system found to have a fully packed habitable zone.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
June 20, 2013 — Dusty Surprise Around Black Hole Found By UCSB Physics Postdoctoral Fellow
This artist's impression shows the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus.
New observations of a nearby active galaxy called NGC 3783 have given a team of astronomers –– including a UC Santa Barbara postdoctoral fellow in physics –– a surprise about active galactic nuclei (AGN), the most energetic objects in the universe.
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
June 19, 2013 — Unusual Supernova is Doubly Unusual for Being Perfectly Normal
Supernova 2011fe was discovered just hours after it exploded in the Big Dipper.
Type Ia supernovae are indispensable milestones for measuring the expansion of the universe. With definitive measures of Supernova 2011fe, the same “Backyard Supernova” that thrilled amateur and professional astronomers alike in the summer of 2011, the Nearby Supernova Factory led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory demonstrates that this unusually close-by Type Ia is such a perfect example of its kind that future Type Ia’s – and models meant to explain their physics – must be measured against it.
view full LBL Press Release
view full LBL Press Release
June 10, 2013 — UCI scientists size up universe’s most lightweight dwarf galaxy
UC Irvine physics & astronomy postdoctoral scholar Evan Kirby is lead author of a paper documenting the least dense galaxy in the known universe, published today in The Astrophysical Journal.
Segue 2, the least massive galaxy in the known universe has been measured by UC Irvine scientists, clocking in at just 1,000 or so stars with a bit of dark matter holding them together. Yet Segue 2 could answer a major riddle perplexing astronomers.
view full UCI Press Release
view full UCI Press Release
June 5, 2013 — Life on Earth shockingly comes from out of this world
Synthesis of prebiotic hydrocarbons in impacts of simple icy mixtures on early Earth.
A Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientist with a former LLNL postdoc found that icy comets that crashed into Earth billions of years ago could have produced life-building organic compounds, including the building blocks of proteins and nucleobases pairs of DNA and RNA. New simulations, developed on LLNL's supercomputers Rzcereal and Aztec, Goldman used much more computationally efficient models and was able to capture hundreds of picoseconds of the impacts—much closer to chemical equilibrium.
view full LLNL Press Release
view full LLNL Press Release
May 31, 2013 — Congressman Farr honors Sandy Faber at Senate meeting
Campus Provost Alison Galloway and Chancellor George Blumenthal, both at left, join Faber and Farr to honor the moment.
U.S. Congressman Sam Farr paid a surprise visit to the May 29 meeting of UCSC's Academic Senate in order to pay tribute to astronomer Sandra Faber, a University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and interim director of UC Observatories.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
May 31, 2013 — Trillion Particle Simulation on Hopper Honored with Best Paper
In testing Hopper, a Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory team helped physicists from the University of California, San Diego, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory identify how energetic particles are generated in magnetic reconnection—the mechanism behind the aurora borealis (a.k.a. northern lights) and solar flares, as well as fractures in Earth’s protective magnetic field—fractures that allow energetic solar particles to seep into our planet’s magnetosphere and wreak havoc in electronics, power grids and space satellites.
view full NERSC Press Release
view full NERSC Press Release
May 30, 2013 — Ancient streambed found on surface of Mars (WITH VIDEO)
These two images compare the outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth.
Rounded pebbles on the surface of Mars indicate that a stream once flowed on the red planet, according to a new study by a team of scientists from NASA’s Curiosity rover mission, including a University of California, Davis, geologist.
view full UCI Press Release
view full UCI Press Release
May 24, 2013 — Astronomers Measure the Elusive Extragalactic Background Light
Alberto Domínguez is a a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UC Riverside.
UC Riverside-led team relies on the attenuation of high-energy gamma rays from supermassive black holes to come up with a solution for how to measure all the light ever emitted in the universe.
view full UCR Press Release
view full UCR Press Release
May 24, 2013 — Detection of the cosmic gamma ray horizon: Measures all the light in the universe since the Big Bang
The attached figure illustrates how energetic gamma rays (dashed lines) from a distant blazar strike photons of extragalactic background light (wavy lines) and produce pairs of electrons and positrons.
How much light has been emitted by all galaxies since the cosmos began? The Universe is suffused in a bath of almost every photon (particle of light) from ultraviolet to far infrared wavelengths ever radiated by all galaxies that ever existed throughout cosmic time. An accurate measurement of this extragalactic background light (EBL) is as fundamental to cosmology as measuring the heat radiation left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background) at radio wavelengths. A new paper, called "Detection of the Cosmic γ-Ray Horizon from Multiwavelength Observations of Blazars," by Alberto Dominguez and six coauthors, just published by the Astrophysical Journal—based on observations spanning wavelengths from radio waves to very energetic gamma rays, obtained from several NASA spacecraft and several ground-based telescopes—describes the best measurement yet of the evolution of the EBL over the past 5 billion years.
view full Press Release
view full Press Release
May 22, 2013 — Fragile mega-galaxy is missing link in history of cosmos
UC Irvine-led researchers teamed up using several telescopes to discover a rare and massive merging of two galaxies that took place when the universe was just 3 billion years old (its current age is about 14 billion years).
Two hungry young galaxies that collided 11 billion years ago are rapidly forming a massive galaxy about 10 times the size of the Milky Way, according to UC Irvine-led research.
view full UCI Press Release
view full UCI Press Release
May 21, 2013 — Comprehensive Analysis of Impact Spherules Supports Theory of Cosmic Impact 12,800 Years Ago
Examples of impact spherules collected from different sites.
About 12,800 years ago when the Earth was warming and emerging from the last ice age, a dramatic and anomalous event occurred that abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. According to a UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor in earth science, this climate switch fundamentally –– and remarkably –– occurred in only one year, heralding the onset of the Younger Dryas cool episode. New evidence supports a cosmic impact theory.
view full UCSB Press Release
view full UCSB Press Release
May 14, 2013 — Optimized BLENDER Code Speeds Up Kepler Planet Analyses
This diagram compares the planets of the inner Solar System to Kepler-69, a two-planet system about 2,700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. The two planets of Kepler-69 orbit a star that belongs to the same class as our Sun. NASA Ames, JPL-Caltech
NASA Ames, May 14, 2013 - Visualization experts in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division have improved the BLENDER software package used by the Kepler mission team to validate planet candidates, greatly shortening runtimes on the Pleiades supercomputer.
view full NASA Ames Press Release
view full NASA Ames Press Release
May 3, 2013 — Extreme Star Formation Reveals a Fleeting Phase of Galactic Evolution
Infrared light pours from the galaxy, just a tiny red dot in this wide-angle view of the sky captured by WISE. Image credit: NASA
A team of nine astronomers, including two from UC campuses, have spotted a galaxy that is igniting new stars faster than ever seen before. Measurements from several space-based and ground-based instruments (including from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea) show that gas in this galaxy is condensing to form stars close to the maximum rate thought possible.
view full UCSD Press Release
view full UCSD Press Release
April 29, 2013 — Astrophysics internships bring community college students to UCSC
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz
Funded by the National Science Foundation, an expanded new Lamat Summer Research Program on High-Performance Computing in Astrophysics trains regional talented community college students in a broad array of valuable scientific skills.
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view full UCSC Press Release
April 22, 2013 — UCLA space scientists find way to monitor elusive collisions in space
Christopher T. Russell
Asteroids collide frequently with other solar system objects, but scientists are not always able to detect such impacts from Earth, nor track their resultant potentially hazardous debris. Based on nearly 30 years of observations, UCLA space scientists have devised a way to monitor collisions in interplanetary space by using a new method to determine the mass of magnetic clouds that result from the impacts—and where to look first to find possibly dangerous debris.
view full UCLA Press Release
view full UCLA Press Release
April 18, 2013 — Distant blazar is a high-energy astrophysics puzzle
Artist's concept of the Hubble Space Telescope viewing ultraviolet light from the jet of the active galactic nucleus of PKS 1424+240. Clouds of hydrogen gas along the line of sight absorb the light at known frequencies, allowing the redshift and distance of each cloud to be determined.
Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei. Blazar PKS 1424+240 is the most distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays, but a team of astronomers (including ones from UC Santa Cruz and Berkeley) observe that its emission spectrum is highly unusual—perhaps indicating something new about the emission mechanisms of blazars, the extragalactic background light, or the propagation of gamma ray photons over vast distances.
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view full UCSC Press Release
April 16, 2013 — UCB chosen to build NASA’s next weather satellite
The ICON satellite will orbit Earth at a 27 degree angle to the equator, pointing its MIGHTI imager and far and extreme ultraviolet sensors at ionospheric storms as on-board instruments measure the flow of charged-particles (guided by the arched magnetic field shown with blue lines) at the position of the satellite.
NASA has awarded the University of California, Berkeley, up to $200 million to build a satellite called the Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) to determine how Earth’s weather affects weather at the edge of space, in hopes of improving forecasts of extreme “space weather” that can disrupt global positioning satellites (GPS) and radio communications.
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view full UCB Press Release
March 27, 2013 — Professor Enlists Android Phones in Search for Black Holes
Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, one of the brains behind the SETI@Home project, an effort to find extraterrestrial life using the world’s personal computers.
Two decades ago, David Anderson, a UC Berkeley computer scientist, developed the open source software platform Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which let a world of volunteers donate the unused processing power of their desktop PCs to various scientific projects. By the late 1990s, BOINC was running on more than a million machines, crunching data for SETI@Home, Einstein@Home, ClimatePrediction.net, and other projects. Today, Anderson and his team have been building BOINC software that runs on both smartphones and tablets, now that these mobile devices have CPUs and graphics processors powerful enough to feed Berkeley’s massively distributed system.
view full Wired Press Release featuring UCB
view full Wired Press Release featuring UCB
March 27, 2013 — UCSC and industry partners launch center for data storage research
Ethan Miller, director of the Center for Research in Storage Systems at UCSC
Researchers in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz are partnering with leaders in the data storage industry to establish the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS), a new Industry/University Cooperative Research Center supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), to address the growing challenges of storing and managing massive amounts of electronic data. CRSS will conduct research in storage systems to enable not only the construction of large-scale data centers, but also the development of tools to manage the vast amounts of data necessary to make exascale computing a reality.
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view full UCSC Press Release
March 21, 2013 — Planck Mission Updates the Age of the Universe and What it Contains
The Planck mission has yielded the most detailed map yet of the cosmic microwave background radiation, from which crucial cosmological parameters have been recalculated.
Crucial contributions to Planck’s analysis have also been made by Julian Borrill, the U.S. Planck Team’s computational systems architect, who led a Berkeley Lab group in creating the thousands of simulations run at NERSC upon which the accuracy of the analysis depended. Another related story is at
view full LBNL Press Release
view full LBNL Press Release
March 21, 2013 — Planck Mission Brings Universe Into Sharp Focus
Map of Matter in the Universe: This full-sky map from the Planck mission shows matter between Earth and the edge of the observable universe. Regions with less mass show up as lighter areas while regions with more mass are darker.
UCSB physicists play key role in international effort to map the early universe. Planck, launched in 2009, has been scanning the skies, mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang that created our universe. This relic radiation provides scientists with a snapshot of the universe 370,000 years after the Big Bang. Light existed before this time, but it was locked in a hot plasma similar to a candle flame, which later cooled and set the light free.
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view full UCSB Press Release
March 14, 2013 — Building the Massive Simulation Sets Essential to Planck Results
From left, Reijo Keskitalo, Aaron Collier, Julian Borrill, and Ted Kisner of the Computational Cosmology Center with some of the many thousands of simulations for Planck Full Focal Plane 6.
Using NERSC supercomputers, scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Computational Cosmology Center generate thousands of simulations to analyze the flood of data from the the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Planck satellite mission, to make the most precise measurement yet of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – the remnant radiation from the Big Bang.
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view full LBNL Press Release
March 14, 2013 — “Water signature in distant planet shows clues to its formation, Lawrence Livermore research finds”
Artist's rendering of the planetary system HR 8799 at an early stage in its evolution, showing the planet HR 8799c, a disk of gas and dust, and interior planets. Image courtesy of Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics; Mediafarm.
A team of international scientists including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. The finding provides astrophysicists with additional insight into how planets are formed. They were able to observe this planet in unprecedented detail because of Keck Obervatory's advanced instrumentation, LLNL’s ground-breaking observing and data processing techniques, and because of the nature of the planetary system.
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view full LLNL Press Release
March 5, 2013 — Evidence that comets could have seeded life on Earth
Comets like Halley’s can be a breeding ground for complex molecules such as dipeptides. Comets colliding with Earth could have delivered these molecules and seeded the growth of more complex proteins and sugars necessary for life.
UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii scientists have shown that complex molecules can form on icy rocks in space, suggesting that comets may have seeded early Earth with the building blocks of life. In results published in the March 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the team zapped icy snowballs of carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons, producing complex molecules, such as dipeptides, that are capable of catalyzing the formation of more complex structures.
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view full UCB Press Release
March 1, 2013 — Instruments detect never-before-seen phenomenon in Earth’s magnetosphere
This NASA rendering depicts Earth's Van Allen radiation belts and the path of the Van Allen Probe spacecraft, which were launched in August 2012. Data from the spacecraft have confirmed a never-before-seen phenomenon—a long-lived zone of high-energy electrons residing between the inner and outer radiation belts.
Mysterious appearance of a relatively long-lived zone of high-energy electrons stored between Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts was witnessed by a team that included a trio of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and one from UC Los Angeles. The surprising findings, discovered by NASA’s Van Allen Probes (formerly known as the Radiation Belt Storm Probes), were outlined in Science Express.
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view full LANL Press Release
February 28, 2013 — SDSC helps craft Big Data top 100 list
The San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, today announced plans for a community-based effort to create the BigData Top100 List, the first global ranking of its kind for systems designed for big data applications. Although this release does not specifically mention computational astronomy, there is a huge amount of astronomical big data. Also mentions a new journal Big Data started in March, whose editorial board includes Michael Franklin from UC Berkeley and other researchers from elsewhere in California.
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view full UCSD Press Release
February 21, 2013 — Stellar motions in outer halo shed new light on Milky Way evolution
This illustration shows the disk of our Milky Way galaxy surrounded by a faint, extended halo of old stars. Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the nearby Andromeda galaxy identified a dozen foreground stars in the Milky Way halo and measured their sideways motions. Illustration Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)
Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have uncovered tantalizing evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that is a relic of the Milky Way's past cannibalism of other galaxies. Led by Alis Deason at UC Santa Cruz and published in the March 4 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the team used data from the Hubble Space Telescope archives and from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to measure precisely, for the first time ever, the sideways (tangential) motions of a small sample of stars located far from the Milky Way’s center. Their unusual lateral motion is circumstantial evidence that the stars may be the remnants of a shredded galaxy that was gravitationally ripped apart by the Milky Way billions of years ago.
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view full UCSC Press Release
February 21, 2013 — UC Riverside Astronomer Awarded Sloan Research Fellowship
Naveen Reddy is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside.
UC Riverside’s Naveen Reddy has been awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Reddy, who studies distant galaxies and their evolution in cosmic time, is working on several projects aimed at understanding the history of star formation and buildup of stellar mass in the universe.
view full UCR Press Release
view full UCR Press Release
February 20, 2013 — Searching for the Solar System’s Chemical Recipe
The protosun evolved in a hot nebula of infalling gas and dust that formed an accretion disk (green) of surrounding matter. Visible and ultraviolet light poured from the sun, irradiating abundant clouds of carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and other chemicals. Temperatures near the sun were hot enough to melt silicates and other minerals, forming the chondrules found in early meteoroids (dashed black circles). Beyond the “snowline” (dashed white curves), water, methane, and other compounds condensed to ice. Numerous chemical reactions contributed to the isotopic ratios seen in relics of the early solar system today.
The ratio of isotopes in elements like oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen in meteorites, interplanetary dust and gas, and the sun itself differ from isotope ratios on Earth. In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, planetary researchers at UC San Dieto and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory describe how they used LBNL’s Advanced Light Source to study these “mass-independent” effects to explore their origins in the chemical processes of the early solar system.
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view full LBNL Press Release
February 6, 2013 — The Last Big Bump Before a Supernova Explodes
The day the supernova exploded (a) it was surrounded by a shell of matter ejected a month earlier (purple) with a radius of 7,000,000,000 kilometers, moving 2,000 kilometers a second. An outer shell (orange) had been ejected earlier and was moving slower. By day 5 (b) the shock front (black circle) was moving 10,000 kilometers a second, and by day 20 (c) had engulfed the inner shell, exposing the debris of the exploded core. (Sketch adapted from Ofek et al, Palomar Transient Factory)
Astronomers have long suspected that the explosion of a Type II supernova is only the last in a series of smaller blasts that successively blow off much of the core’s enveloping matter. Despite many such suggestive clues, no causal proof had previously linked precursor “bumps” in brightness to an actual supernova.
On August 25, 2010, the autonomous machine-learning framework (developed by Josh Bloom of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Peter Nugent of the Computational Research Division and their colleagues) was combing through recent data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and came upon a Type IIn supernova, half a billion light years away in the constellation Hercules. Shortly thereafter, Eran Ofek of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science led a search of previous PTF scans of the stellar neighborhood and found its likely precursor, a massive variable star that only 40 days before it went supernova had shed a huge amount of mass.
view full LBNL Press Release
On August 25, 2010, the autonomous machine-learning framework (developed by Josh Bloom of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Peter Nugent of the Computational Research Division and their colleagues) was combing through recent data from the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and came upon a Type IIn supernova, half a billion light years away in the constellation Hercules. Shortly thereafter, Eran Ofek of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science led a search of previous PTF scans of the stellar neighborhood and found its likely precursor, a massive variable star that only 40 days before it went supernova had shed a huge amount of mass.
view full LBNL Press Release
February 6, 2013 — A Massive Stellar Burst, Before the Supernova
An automated supernova hunt is shedding new light on the death sequence of massive stars—specifically, the kind that self-destruct in Type IIn supernova explosions. Digging through the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) data archive housed at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), astronomers have found the first causal evidence that these massive stars shed huge amounts of material in a “penultimate outburst” before final detonation as supernovae.
view full NERSC Press Release
view full NERSC Press Release
February 1, 2013 — SDSC Mourns the Loss of Dr. Robert P. Harkness
Dr. Robert P. Harkness
Robert P. Harkness, a computational astrophysicist with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, died on Sunday, January 27, after a brief bout with cancer. He was 56. With a total of more than 30 years’ experience in computational science and high-performance computing, he focused much of his research on the dynamics of exploding stars (novae and supernovae), but also specialized in writing new applications that allowed researchers worldwide to perform ever-larger computer simulations.
view full SDSC Press Release
view full SDSC Press Release
January 23, 2013 — Astronomer Mark Krumholz awarded AAS Warner Prize
Mark Krumholz, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics. (Photo by J. MacKenzie)
Krumholz, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, studies the formation of massive stars, the structure and evolution of molecular clouds in space, and processes that regulate star formation in galaxies using a mix of numerical and analytic techniques. The citation accompanying the prize recognizes Krumholz "for major theoretical contributions in the areas of massive star formation and the interstellar medium, both in the galaxy and in the early universe." The Warner Prize is awarded annually for a significant contribution to observational or theoretical astronomy by an early-career scientist.
view full UCSC Press Release
view full UCSC Press Release
January 8, 2013 — Earth-size planets common in galaxy
The fraction of Sun-like stars having planets of different sizes, orbiting within 1/4 of the Earth-Sun distance (0.25 AU) of the host star. The graph shows that planets as small as Earth (far left) are relatively common compared to planets 8.0x the size of Earth (similar to Jupiter). The gray indicates the planets discovered in this study, and the orange represents the correction applied to account for planets the TERRA software would miss statistically, typically about 20%.
A thorough re-analysis of the first three years of data from NASA’s Kepler mission by a team of astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa with a new software program called TERRA (Transiting Exoearth Robust Reduction Algorithm) identified 129 Earth-like planets ranging in size from nearly six times the diameter of Earth to the diameter of Mars. Thirty-seven of these planets were not identified in previous Kepler reports.
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view full UCB Press Release
December 18, 2012 — Closest single star like our Sun may have a habitable planet
An artist's impression of the Tau Ceti system. (Image by J. Pinfield for the RoPACS network at the University of Hertfordshire, 2012)
By Tim Stephens
An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may host five planets, including one in the star's habitable zone.
At a distance of twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun. Its five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth, making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected. One of the planets lies in the habitable zone of the star and has a mass around five times that of Earth, making it the smallest planet found to be orbiting in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star.
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An international team of astronomers has discovered that Tau Ceti, one of the closest and most Sun-like stars, may host five planets, including one in the star's habitable zone.
At a distance of twelve light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky, Tau Ceti is the closest single star that has the same spectral classification as our Sun. Its five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times the mass of the Earth, making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected. One of the planets lies in the habitable zone of the star and has a mass around five times that of Earth, making it the smallest planet found to be orbiting in the habitable zone of any Sun-like star.
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December 17, 2012 — Top physicists gather at UCSC to honor Michael Dine and Howard Haber
Physicists Michael Dine (left) and Howard Haber on the UCSC campus.
Top physicists from around the world will gather at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in January for a symposium in honor of two eminent theoretical physicists on the UCSC faculty: Michael Dine, distinguished professor and chair of the Physics Department, and Howard Haber, professor of physics.
Dine and Haber, who are being honored on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, are both well known for their contributions to the field of theoretical high-energy physics. The symposium, "The Search for Fundamental Physics: Higgs Bosons and Supersymmetry," will take place January 4 to 6, 2013.
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Dine and Haber, who are being honored on the occasion of their 60th birthdays, are both well known for their contributions to the field of theoretical high-energy physics. The symposium, "The Search for Fundamental Physics: Higgs Bosons and Supersymmetry," will take place January 4 to 6, 2013.
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December 17, 2012 — New Survey of Distant Galaxies Will Trace Changes Over Billions of Years
Optical images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of distant galaxies in one of the first fields to be measured by the new collaboration. The new measurements will reveal details of the galaxies’ gases, stars and black holes. Credit: NASA/CANDELS.
By Susan Brown
Astronomers will begin an ambitious new project to measure light from thousands of distant galaxies this weekend. Over the next four years, they will spend 47 nights surveying the sky for signals from a time when the Universe was just 2 to 4 billion years old and the earliest galaxies were forming.
“In the last 10 years or so we have obtained very large samples of nearby galaxies that reveal enormous amounts of information about the stellar, gas and dust content,” said Alison Coil, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and one of the leaders of the project. “For these very distant galaxies we have images, especially from the Hubble Space Telescope, but we have far less information about the details of the stars, gas, dust, and black holes in them.”
view full UCSD Press Release
Astronomers will begin an ambitious new project to measure light from thousands of distant galaxies this weekend. Over the next four years, they will spend 47 nights surveying the sky for signals from a time when the Universe was just 2 to 4 billion years old and the earliest galaxies were forming.
“In the last 10 years or so we have obtained very large samples of nearby galaxies that reveal enormous amounts of information about the stellar, gas and dust content,” said Alison Coil, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences and one of the leaders of the project. “For these very distant galaxies we have images, especially from the Hubble Space Telescope, but we have far less information about the details of the stars, gas, dust, and black holes in them.”
view full UCSD Press Release
December 14, 2012 — UCSB Physicists Make Strides in Understanding Quantum Entanglement
Leon Balents Credit: Rod Rolle
Santa Barbara, Calif. - While some theoretical physicists make predictions about astrophysics and the behavior of stars and galaxies, others work in the realm of the very small, which includes quantum physics. Such is the case at UC Santa Barbara, where theoretical physicists at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) cover the range of questions in physics.
Recently, theoretical physicists at KITP have made important strides in studying a concept in quantum physics called quantum entanglement, in which electron spins are entangled with each other. Using computers to calculate the extreme version of quantum entanglement –– how the spin of every electron in certain electronic materials could be entangled with another electron's spin –– the research team found a way to predict this characteristic. Future applications of the research are expected to benefit fields such as information technology.
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Recently, theoretical physicists at KITP have made important strides in studying a concept in quantum physics called quantum entanglement, in which electron spins are entangled with each other. Using computers to calculate the extreme version of quantum entanglement –– how the spin of every electron in certain electronic materials could be entangled with another electron's spin –– the research team found a way to predict this characteristic. Future applications of the research are expected to benefit fields such as information technology.
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December 12, 2012 — X-ray laser takes aim at cosmic mystery
A photograph of the instrument setup for an astrophysics experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory''s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful X-ray laser. The experiment was conducted in the Soft X-ray hutch using this electron beam ion trap, or EBIT, built at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany.
By Anne M Stark
An international collaboration including researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has refined a key process in understanding extreme plasmas such as those found in the sun, stars, at the rims of black holes and galaxy clusters.
In short, the team identified a new solution to an astrophysical phenomenon through a series of laser experiments.
In the new research, appearing in the Dec. 13 edition of the journal Nature, scientists looked at highly charged iron using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) free-electron laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.. Highly charged iron produces some of the brightest X-ray emission lines from hot astrophysical objects, including galaxy clusters, stellar cornae and the emission of the sun.
view full LLNL Press Release
An international collaboration including researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has refined a key process in understanding extreme plasmas such as those found in the sun, stars, at the rims of black holes and galaxy clusters.
In short, the team identified a new solution to an astrophysical phenomenon through a series of laser experiments.
In the new research, appearing in the Dec. 13 edition of the journal Nature, scientists looked at highly charged iron using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) free-electron laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.. Highly charged iron produces some of the brightest X-ray emission lines from hot astrophysical objects, including galaxy clusters, stellar cornae and the emission of the sun.
view full LLNL Press Release
December 11, 2012 — UCSB's Joseph Incandela Receives Prestigious International Physics Prize
Joseph Incandela delivers his historic presentation to the seminar at CERN on July 4, 2012 Credit: CERN
Santa Barbara, Calif. - Joseph Incandela, professor of physics at UC Santa Barbara and spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the European Organization for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has been awarded a Special Fundamental Physics Prize by the Milner Foundation.
Incandela will share the $3 million prize with six other members of the LHC project, including Peter Jenni, Fabiola Gianotti, Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli, and Lyn Evans. The group is being recognized for its leadership role in the scientific endeavor that led to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN's LHC.
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Incandela will share the $3 million prize with six other members of the LHC project, including Peter Jenni, Fabiola Gianotti, Michel Della Negra, Tejinder Singh Virdee, Guido Tonelli, and Lyn Evans. The group is being recognized for its leadership role in the scientific endeavor that led to the discovery of the new Higgs-like particle by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations at CERN's LHC.
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December 11, 2012 — UCSB Physicist Receives International Acclaim for His Work in Theoretical Physics
Joseph Polchinski
Santa Barbara, Calif. - Joseph Polchinski, a permanent member of UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) and professor of physics at UCSB, has been named one of three recipients of the 2013 Physics Frontier Prize from the Milner Foundation.
With the award, Polchinski becomes a nominee for the foundation's $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, which will be presented on March 20, 2013, in a special ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Frontier Prize laureates who do not win the Fundamental Physics Prize receive an award of $300,000, and are automatically nominated again each year for the next five years.
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With the award, Polchinski becomes a nominee for the foundation's $3 million Fundamental Physics Prize, which will be presented on March 20, 2013, in a special ceremony at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. Frontier Prize laureates who do not win the Fundamental Physics Prize receive an award of $300,000, and are automatically nominated again each year for the next five years.
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December 5, 2012 — Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Gives a Big Boost to BigBOSS
The BigBOSS proposal adds a new widefield, prime-focus corrector to the Mayall 4-meter telescope. A focal array with 5,000 optical fibers, individually positioned by robotic actuators, delivers light to a set of 10 three-arm spectrometers. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Background photo Mark Duggan)
By Paul Preuss
A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technologies for BigBOSS, a project now in the proposal stage designed to study dark energy with unprecedented precision. BigBOSS is based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
“BigBOSS is the next big thing in cosmology,” says Uroš Seljak, Director of the BCCP, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Berkeley and a member of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division. “It would map millions and millions of galaxies, allowing us to measure dark energy to high precision – and would yield other important scientific results as well, including determining neutrino mass and the number of neutrino families.”
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A $2.1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to the University of California at Berkeley, through the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP), will fund the development of revolutionary technologies for BigBOSS, a project now in the proposal stage designed to study dark energy with unprecedented precision. BigBOSS is based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
“BigBOSS is the next big thing in cosmology,” says Uroš Seljak, Director of the BCCP, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at UC Berkeley and a member of Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division. “It would map millions and millions of galaxies, allowing us to measure dark energy to high precision – and would yield other important scientific results as well, including determining neutrino mass and the number of neutrino families.”
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November 29, 2012 — High Honor for Two Physicists
Richard Seto (top) and Jing Shi are professors of physics and astronomy at UC Riverside.
By Iqbal Pittalwala
Two physicists at the University of California, Riverside — Richard Seto and Jing Shi — have been elected as fellows of the American Physical Society (APS). Only 250 researchers received the high honor this year.
The APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Fellowship in the society is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership. The evaluation process for fellowship election is done entirely by one’s professional peers.
view full UCR Press Release
Two physicists at the University of California, Riverside — Richard Seto and Jing Shi — have been elected as fellows of the American Physical Society (APS). Only 250 researchers received the high honor this year.
The APS represents more than 50,000 members, including physicists in academia, national laboratories and industry in the United States and throughout the world. Fellowship in the society is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the membership. The evaluation process for fellowship election is done entirely by one’s professional peers.
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November 29, 2012 — Physicist Robert Johnson elected Fellow of American Physical Society
Robert Johnson
By Tim Stephens
Robert Johnson, professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in recognition of his exceptional contributions to physics.
Johnson works in the areas of experimental particle physics and high-energy astrophysics and is associate director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). The APS citation recognizes him "for his leadership of the design and implementation of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Tracker." The LAT is the primary instrument on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Johnson led a SCIPP team that spent nearly 16 years working on the gamma-ray detecting system for the LAT. Since the launch of Fermi in 2008, his group has been involved in analyzing data from the instrument.
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Robert Johnson, professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in recognition of his exceptional contributions to physics.
Johnson works in the areas of experimental particle physics and high-energy astrophysics and is associate director of the Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics (SCIPP). The APS citation recognizes him "for his leadership of the design and implementation of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Tracker." The LAT is the primary instrument on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Johnson led a SCIPP team that spent nearly 16 years working on the gamma-ray detecting system for the LAT. Since the launch of Fermi in 2008, his group has been involved in analyzing data from the instrument.
view full UCSC Press Release
November 15, 2012 — Dark Matter Detector Installed Underground and Submerged; Data Collection to Begin in 2013
UC Davis physicist Jeremy Mock inspects the LUX detector, the cylinder in the center, inside its protective water tank, which now has been filled with ultra-pure water.
Santa Barbara, Calif. - An experiment to look for one of nature's most elusive subatomic particles is finally under water, in a stainless steel tank nearly a mile underground, beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota.
The Large Underground Xenon experiment, nicknamed LUX, will be the most sensitive device yet to look for dark matter. Thought to comprise more than 80 percent of the mass of the universe, dark matter has so far eluded direct detection.
"This is a major step forward on the road to an operational detector in early 2013," said Mike Headley, laboratory director for the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) in Lead, S.D. The Sanford Lab, located in the former Homestake gold mine, is owned and operated by the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, with support from the Department of Energy, and oversight by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
view full UCSB Press Release
The Large Underground Xenon experiment, nicknamed LUX, will be the most sensitive device yet to look for dark matter. Thought to comprise more than 80 percent of the mass of the universe, dark matter has so far eluded direct detection.
"This is a major step forward on the road to an operational detector in early 2013," said Mike Headley, laboratory director for the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) in Lead, S.D. The Sanford Lab, located in the former Homestake gold mine, is owned and operated by the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, with support from the Department of Energy, and oversight by DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
view full UCSB Press Release
October 27, 2011 — Astronomers Pin Down Galaxy Collision by Comparing Hubble Space Telescope Photographs to Supercomputer Simulations
Mosaic shows the sequence of events as two spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way merge. As the two galaxies approach (upper left), on their first close pass, they sideswipe each other, throwing out long tails of stars and gas (upper right).
A new analysis of images from the Hubble Space Telescope combined with supercomputer simulations of galaxy collisions has cleared up years of confusion about the rate at which smaller galaxies merge to form bigger ones. This paper, led by Jennifer Lotz of Space Telescope Science Institute, is about to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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October 24, 2012 — Galaxy halos are produced by orphan stars, findings indicate
New research from UC Irvine scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggests that a mysterious infrared glow across our whole sky is coming from stray stars torn from galaxies. When galaxies grow, they merge and become gravitationally tangled in a violent process that results in streams of stars being ripped away from the galaxies.
Irvine - Isolated stars kicked to the edges of space by violent galaxy mergers may be the cause of mysterious infrared light halos observed across the sky, according to UC Irvine and other astronomers.
“Background glow in our sky has been a huge unanswered question,” said UCI physics & astronomy professor Asantha Cooray, lead author of a paper about the discovery in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Nature. “We have new evidence that this light is from stars that linger between galaxies. Individually, they’re too dim to be seen, but we think we’re seeing their collective blush.”
Cooray and colleagues examined 250 hours of data captured by NASA’s powerful Spitzer Space Telescope from a large swath of sky called the Boötes field, which covers the equivalent of 40 full moons near the constellation of the same name. The large scale allowed the researchers to better analyze the patterns of diffuse light.
view full UCI Press Release
“Background glow in our sky has been a huge unanswered question,” said UCI physics & astronomy professor Asantha Cooray, lead author of a paper about the discovery in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Nature. “We have new evidence that this light is from stars that linger between galaxies. Individually, they’re too dim to be seen, but we think we’re seeing their collective blush.”
Cooray and colleagues examined 250 hours of data captured by NASA’s powerful Spitzer Space Telescope from a large swath of sky called the Boötes field, which covers the equivalent of 40 full moons near the constellation of the same name. The large scale allowed the researchers to better analyze the patterns of diffuse light.
view full UCI Press Release
October 23, 2012 — NASA - Computer Model Shows a Disk Galaxy's Life History
A cosmological simulation run on the Pleiades supercomputer (using more than a million CPU hours) shows the development of a disk galaxy over 13.5 billion years from shortly after the Big Bang to the present.
view LANL abstract
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October 22, 2012 — Milky Way's black hole getting ready for snack
Simulations of the dust and gas cloud G2 on its orbit around the Milky Way central black hole SgrA*. Photo courtesy of M. Schartmann and L. Calcada/ European Southern Observatory and Max-Planck-Institut fur Extraterrestrische Physik.
Robert H Hirschfeld, LLNL, (925) 422-2379, hirschfeld2@llnl.gov
Get ready for a fascinating eating experience in the center of our galaxy.
The event involves a black hole that may devour much of an approaching cloud of dust and gas known as G2.
A supercomputer simulation prepared by two Lab physicists and a former postdoc suggests that some of G2 will survive, although its surviving mass will be torn apart, leaving it with a different shape and questionable fate.
The findings are the work of computational physicist Peter Anninos and astrophysicist Stephen Murray, both of AX division within the Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate (WCI), along with their former postdoc Chris Fragile, now an associate professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and his student, Julia Wilson.
They came up with six simulations, using the Cosmos++ computer code developed by Anninos and Fragile, which required more than 50,000 computing hours on 3,000 processors on the Palmetto supercomputer at Clemson University in Columbia, S.C. ...
view full LLNL Press Release
Get ready for a fascinating eating experience in the center of our galaxy.
The event involves a black hole that may devour much of an approaching cloud of dust and gas known as G2.
A supercomputer simulation prepared by two Lab physicists and a former postdoc suggests that some of G2 will survive, although its surviving mass will be torn apart, leaving it with a different shape and questionable fate.
The findings are the work of computational physicist Peter Anninos and astrophysicist Stephen Murray, both of AX division within the Weapons and Complex Integration Directorate (WCI), along with their former postdoc Chris Fragile, now an associate professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and his student, Julia Wilson.
They came up with six simulations, using the Cosmos++ computer code developed by Anninos and Fragile, which required more than 50,000 computing hours on 3,000 processors on the Palmetto supercomputer at Clemson University in Columbia, S.C. ...
view full LLNL Press Release
October 19, 2012 — Over the Last 8 Billion Years, Beautiful Rotating Disk Galaxies Like Our Own Milky Way Gradually Formed From Earlier Chaotic Systems.
This plot shows the fractions of settled disk galaxies in four time spans, each about 3 billion years long. There is a steady shift toward higher percentages of settled galaxies closer to the present time. At any given time, the most massive galaxies are the most settled. More distant and less massive galaxies on average exhibit more disorganized internal motions, with gas moving in multiple directions, and slower rotation speeds.
Spectroscopic observations of distant galaxies taken with the 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii, when combined with images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope plus supercomputer simulations to help interpret the observations, together reveal a major surprise: that a standard assumption about the evolution of galaxies is not correct.
Astronomers had thought that disk galaxies (like our own Milky Way) had largely finished forming by about 8 billion years ago, as indicated by the rates at which stars are formed in the Universe. Therefore, many astronomers have assumed that distant, much younger disk galaxies are not all that different from nearby ones.
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Astronomers had thought that disk galaxies (like our own Milky Way) had largely finished forming by about 8 billion years ago, as indicated by the rates at which stars are formed in the Universe. Therefore, many astronomers have assumed that distant, much younger disk galaxies are not all that different from nearby ones.
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October 19, 2012 — Astronomers uncover a surprising trend in galaxy evolution
Image credit: NASA/HST
By Tim Stephens
A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe.
"Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago, with little additional development since," said Susan Kassin, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the study's lead researcher. "The trend we've observed instead shows the opposite, that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period."
view full UCSC Press Release
A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe.
"Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into their present form by about 8 billion years ago, with little additional development since," said Susan Kassin, an astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the study's lead researcher. "The trend we've observed instead shows the opposite, that galaxies were steadily changing over this time period."
view full UCSC Press Release
October 18, 2012 — Violent Origin of Saturn's Oddball Moons Explained
Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus hangs below the gas giant’s rings while Titan lurks in the background, in this new image taken by the Cassini spacecraft on March 12, 2012. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
by SPACE.com Staff
Saturn's icy medium-size moons were born when a few much bigger satellites collided to form the ringed planet's huge moon Titan, a new study suggests.
The Saturn system started out with a family of several relatively large moons like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io), according to the new theory. But things changed with a few dramatic moon mergers, which created the Titan we know today and shed enough material to form satellites such as Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus, researchers said.
"We think that the giant planets got their satellites kind of like the sun got its planets, growing like miniature solar systems and ending with a stage of final collisions," lead author Erik Asphaug, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement...
view full SPACE.com article
view full UCSC Press Release
Saturn's icy medium-size moons were born when a few much bigger satellites collided to form the ringed planet's huge moon Titan, a new study suggests.
The Saturn system started out with a family of several relatively large moons like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter (Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io), according to the new theory. But things changed with a few dramatic moon mergers, which created the Titan we know today and shed enough material to form satellites such as Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus, researchers said.
"We think that the giant planets got their satellites kind of like the sun got its planets, growing like miniature solar systems and ending with a stage of final collisions," lead author Erik Asphaug, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement...
view full SPACE.com article
view full UCSC Press Release
October 17, 2012 — Keck observations reveal complex face of Uranus
The two faces of Uranus as seen through the adaptive optics on the near-infrared camera of the Keck II telescope in Hawaii. The white features are high altitude clouds like Earth’s cumulous clouds, while the bright blue-green features are thinner high-altitude clouds akin to cirrus clouds. Reddish tints indicate deeper cloud layers. In each image, the north pole is at the right and is highlighted by small convective spots highly reminiscent of features seen on Saturn’s pole.
By Robert Sanders
The planet Uranus, known since Voyager’s 1986 flyby as a bland, featureless blue-green orb, is beginning to show its face.
By using a new technique with the telescopes of the Keck Observatory, astronomers have created the most richly detailed, highest-resolution images ever taken of the giant ice planet in the near infrared, revealing an incredible array of atmospheric detail and more complex weather.
The planet, in fact, looks like many of the solar system’s other large planets — the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and the ice giant Neptune — said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the team members. The planet has bands of circulating clouds, massive swirling hurricanes and an unusual swarm of convective features at its north pole.
view full UCB Press Release
The planet Uranus, known since Voyager’s 1986 flyby as a bland, featureless blue-green orb, is beginning to show its face.
By using a new technique with the telescopes of the Keck Observatory, astronomers have created the most richly detailed, highest-resolution images ever taken of the giant ice planet in the near infrared, revealing an incredible array of atmospheric detail and more complex weather.
The planet, in fact, looks like many of the solar system’s other large planets — the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and the ice giant Neptune — said Imke de Pater, professor and chair of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the team members. The planet has bands of circulating clouds, massive swirling hurricanes and an unusual swarm of convective features at its north pole.
view full UCB Press Release
October 17, 2012 — Massive Planetary Collision May Have Zapped Key Elements from Moon
A celestial body about the size of the moon slams into a planetary body the size of Mercury in this artist's conception. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
By Mario Aguilera
Fresh examinations of lunar rocks gathered by Apollo mission astronauts have yielded new insights about the moon’s chemical makeup as well as clues about the giant impacts that may have shaped the early beginnings of Earth and the moon.
Geochemist James Day of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and colleagues Randal Paniello and Frédéric Moynier at Washington University in St. Louis used advanced technological instrumentation to probe the chemical signatures of moon rocks obtained during four lunar missions and meteorites collected from the Antarctic. The data revealed new findings about elements known as volatiles, which offer key information about how planets may have formed and evolved.
view full UCSD Press Release
Fresh examinations of lunar rocks gathered by Apollo mission astronauts have yielded new insights about the moon’s chemical makeup as well as clues about the giant impacts that may have shaped the early beginnings of Earth and the moon.
Geochemist James Day of Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and colleagues Randal Paniello and Frédéric Moynier at Washington University in St. Louis used advanced technological instrumentation to probe the chemical signatures of moon rocks obtained during four lunar missions and meteorites collected from the Antarctic. The data revealed new findings about elements known as volatiles, which offer key information about how planets may have formed and evolved.
view full UCSD Press Release
October 17, 2012 — Giant impact scenario may explain the unusual moons of Saturn
Saturn's baffling diversity of moons includes, clockwise from Titan (upper right), Iapetus, Hyperion, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, and Mimas, with Rhea in the center. (Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI; montage by E. Lakdawalla)
By Tim Stephens
Among the oddities of the outer solar system are the middle-sized moons of Saturn, a half-dozen icy bodies dwarfed by Saturn's massive moon Titan. According to a new model for the origin of the Saturn system, these middle-sized moons were spawned during giant impacts in which several major satellites merged to form Titan.
Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present this new hypothesis October 19 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada. Asphaug and his coauthor, Andreas Reufer of the University of Bern, Switzerland, also describe their model in detail in a paper to be published in Icarus (in press).
view full UCSC Press Release
Among the oddities of the outer solar system are the middle-sized moons of Saturn, a half-dozen icy bodies dwarfed by Saturn's massive moon Titan. According to a new model for the origin of the Saturn system, these middle-sized moons were spawned during giant impacts in which several major satellites merged to form Titan.
Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will present this new hypothesis October 19 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Reno, Nevada. Asphaug and his coauthor, Andreas Reufer of the University of Bern, Switzerland, also describe their model in detail in a paper to be published in Icarus (in press).
view full UCSC Press Release
October 12, 2012 — Mapping the Sky
UCSC Professor of Astronomy Connie Rockosi, a member of the multi-institutional team that built the digital scanning camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (Photo courtesy Fermilab Visual Media Services)
By Dana Mackenzie
On Friday nights,while her high school classmates were going to parties, Connie Rockosi enjoyed a different kind of celebration: star parties at her local astronomy club in Cranford, New Jersey.
One night, she saw a star disappear as it passed behind the rings of Saturn and then wink at her through a gap in the rings. Even if she couldn't see the gap directly, the reappearance of the star proved that it was there.
"It was a neat experience," she says. "It's the kind of detective work that we have to do as astronomers, because we can't go out and poke at the things we observe. We have to tell a story based on very limited and indirect observations. This was my first taste of what it's like to do science."
view full UCSC Press Release
On Friday nights,while her high school classmates were going to parties, Connie Rockosi enjoyed a different kind of celebration: star parties at her local astronomy club in Cranford, New Jersey.
One night, she saw a star disappear as it passed behind the rings of Saturn and then wink at her through a gap in the rings. Even if she couldn't see the gap directly, the reappearance of the star proved that it was there.
"It was a neat experience," she says. "It's the kind of detective work that we have to do as astronomers, because we can't go out and poke at the things we observe. We have to tell a story based on very limited and indirect observations. This was my first taste of what it's like to do science."
view full UCSC Press Release
October 5, 2012 — Grants help scientists explore boundary between science & science fiction
Lasers in use by telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. If aliens elsewhere in the galaxy use lasers for astronomy or communications, we may be able to detect them from Earth. Courtesy of Keck Observatory.
Berkeley - Two University of California, Berkeley, scientists have received research grants to explore areas of science that bleed into science fiction.
Astronomer Geoff Marcy, who kicked off the search for extrasolar planets 20 years ago, plans to rummage through data from the Kepler space telescope in search of evidence for civilizations advanced enough to have built massive orbiting “solar” power stations.
Theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso will look for ways of detecting universes other than our own, and try to understand what these alternate universes, or multiverses, will look like.
Marcy and Bousso are among 20 innovative researchers who will share more than $4 million in New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grants that were announced Thursday, Oct. 4, by the University of Chicago. The grants were made possible through funding from the Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation as a way to encourage scientists and students worldwide to explore fundamental, big questions in astronomy and cosmology that engage groundbreaking ideas on the nature of the universe...
view full UCB Press Release
Astronomer Geoff Marcy, who kicked off the search for extrasolar planets 20 years ago, plans to rummage through data from the Kepler space telescope in search of evidence for civilizations advanced enough to have built massive orbiting “solar” power stations.
Theoretical physicist Raphael Bousso will look for ways of detecting universes other than our own, and try to understand what these alternate universes, or multiverses, will look like.
Marcy and Bousso are among 20 innovative researchers who will share more than $4 million in New Frontiers in Astronomy & Cosmology International Grants that were announced Thursday, Oct. 4, by the University of Chicago. The grants were made possible through funding from the Pennsylvania-based John Templeton Foundation as a way to encourage scientists and students worldwide to explore fundamental, big questions in astronomy and cosmology that engage groundbreaking ideas on the nature of the universe...
view full UCB Press Release
October 4, 2012 — Livermore experiments illuminate how order arises in the cosmos
Plasmas stream from the top and bottom to form large-scale electromagnetic fields.
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth.
The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases (also known as plasmas) will give scientists a new way to explore how order emerges from chaos in the cosmos. This breakthrough finding was published online in the journal, Nature Physics on Sept. 30.
"We've created a model for exploring how electromagnetic fields help organize ionized gas or plasma in astrophysical settings, such as in the plasma flows that emerge from young stars," said lead author Nathan Kugland, a postdoctoral researcher in the High Energy Density Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). "These fields help shape the flows, and likely play a supporting role alongside gravity in the formation of solar systems, which can eventually lead to the creation of planets like the Earth."...
view full LLNL Press Release
The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases (also known as plasmas) will give scientists a new way to explore how order emerges from chaos in the cosmos. This breakthrough finding was published online in the journal, Nature Physics on Sept. 30.
"We've created a model for exploring how electromagnetic fields help organize ionized gas or plasma in astrophysical settings, such as in the plasma flows that emerge from young stars," said lead author Nathan Kugland, a postdoctoral researcher in the High Energy Density Science Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). "These fields help shape the flows, and likely play a supporting role alongside gravity in the formation of solar systems, which can eventually lead to the creation of planets like the Earth."...
view full LLNL Press Release
October 4, 2012 — UCLA astronomers discover star racing around black hole at center of our galaxy
Keck telescopes observe the center of our galaxy
By Stuart Wolpert
UCLA astronomers report the discovery of a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years — the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole.
The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics.
The research is published Oct. 5 in the journal Science.
view full UCLA Press Release
UCLA astronomers report the discovery of a remarkable star that orbits the enormous black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy in a blistering 11-and-a-half years — the shortest known orbit of any star near this black hole.
The star, known as S0-102, may help astronomers discover whether Albert Einstein was right in his fundamental prediction of how black holes warp space and time, said research co-author Andrea Ghez, leader of the discovery team and a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy who holds the Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Chair in Astrophysics.
The research is published Oct. 5 in the journal Science.
view full UCLA Press Release
October 24, 2012 — Astronomers report dark matter 'halos' may contain stars, disprove other theories
The image on the left shows a portion of our sky, called the Boötes field, in infrared light, while the image on the right shows a mysterious, background infrared glow captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in the same region of sky. Using Spitzer, researchers were able to detect this background glow, which spreads across the whole sky, by masking out light from galaxies and other known sources of light.
By Stuart Wolpert
Could it be that dark matter "halos" — the huge, invisible cocoons of mass that envelop entire galaxies and account for most of the matter in the universe — aren't completely dark after all but contain a small number of stars? Astronomers from UCLA, UC Irvine and elsewhere make a case for that in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Nature.
Astronomers have long disagreed about why they see more light in the universe than it seems they should — that is, why the infrared light they observe exceeds the amount of light emitted from known galaxies.
When looking at the cosmos, astronomers have seen what are neither stars nor galaxies nor a uniform dark sky but mysterious, sandpaper-like smatterings of light, which UCLA's Edward L. (Ned) Wright refers to as "fluctuations." The debate has centered around what exactly the source of those fluctuations is.
view full UCLA Press Release
Could it be that dark matter "halos" — the huge, invisible cocoons of mass that envelop entire galaxies and account for most of the matter in the universe — aren't completely dark after all but contain a small number of stars? Astronomers from UCLA, UC Irvine and elsewhere make a case for that in the Oct. 25 issue of the journal Nature.
Astronomers have long disagreed about why they see more light in the universe than it seems they should — that is, why the infrared light they observe exceeds the amount of light emitted from known galaxies.
When looking at the cosmos, astronomers have seen what are neither stars nor galaxies nor a uniform dark sky but mysterious, sandpaper-like smatterings of light, which UCLA's Edward L. (Ned) Wright refers to as "fluctuations." The debate has centered around what exactly the source of those fluctuations is.
view full UCLA Press Release
October 2, 2012 — Panofsky Prize Honors Researchers' Underground Hunt for Dark Matter
Blas Cabrera, the Stanley G. Wojcicki Professor in the Stanford Physics Department, who has a term appointment at SLAC, is a recipient of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle... (Photo courtesy Stanford University)
by Glenn Roberts Jr.
The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC's founding director, Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky, and awarded by the American Physical Society.
While some researchers are scanning the heavens with powerful telescopes to detect dark matter or crashing particles together in an effort to create and study its exotic components, Sadoulet, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Cabrera, of Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, have sought the same answers in deep shafts largely shielded from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle "noise."
Their continuing, decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. If they are proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe...
view full SLAC Press Release
The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The prize is named for SLAC's founding director, Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky, and awarded by the American Physical Society.
While some researchers are scanning the heavens with powerful telescopes to detect dark matter or crashing particles together in an effort to create and study its exotic components, Sadoulet, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Cabrera, of Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, have sought the same answers in deep shafts largely shielded from cosmic rays and other unwanted particle "noise."
Their continuing, decades-long Cryogenic Dark Matter Search has brought them to several underground sites in the hunt for direct evidence of theorized weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. If they are proven to exist, WIMPs could help define and explain dark matter, which is thought to make up about 25 percent of the energy density in the universe and is responsible for the formation of structure in the universe...
view full SLAC Press Release
September 27, 2012 — Simulations Uncover 'Flashy' Secrets of Merging Black Holes
According to Einstein, whenever massive objects interact, they produce gravitational waves -- distortions in the very fabric of space and time -- that ripple outward across the universe at the speed of light. While astronomers have found indirect evidence of these disturbances, the waves have so far eluded direct detection. Ground-based observatories designed to find them are on the verge of achieving greater sensitivities, and many scientists think that this discovery is just a few years away.
Catching gravitational waves from some of the strongest sources -- colliding black holes with millions of times the sun's mass -- will take a little longer. These waves undulate so slowly that they won't be detectable by ground-based facilities. Instead, scientists will need much larger space-based instruments, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which was endorsed as a high-priority future project by the astronomical community.
A team that includes astrophysicists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is looking forward to that day by using computational models to explore the mergers of supersized black holes. Their most recent work investigates what kind of "flash" might be seen by telescopes when astronomers ultimately find gravitational signals from such an event. ..
view full NASA Ames Press Release
Catching gravitational waves from some of the strongest sources -- colliding black holes with millions of times the sun's mass -- will take a little longer. These waves undulate so slowly that they won't be detectable by ground-based facilities. Instead, scientists will need much larger space-based instruments, such as the proposed Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, which was endorsed as a high-priority future project by the astronomical community.
A team that includes astrophysicists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., is looking forward to that day by using computational models to explore the mergers of supersized black holes. Their most recent work investigates what kind of "flash" might be seen by telescopes when astronomers ultimately find gravitational signals from such an event. ..
view full NASA Ames Press Release
September 25, 2012 — Hubble produces deepest ever view of the universe
A wide variety of distant galaxies can be seen in this section of the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF). See video below. (Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, UC Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team)
By Ray Villard, STScI
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.
Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by a team led by Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. The image combines 10 years of Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The size of the XDF on the sky is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon...
view full UCSC Press Release
Like photographers assembling a portfolio of best shots, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of mankind's deepest-ever view of the universe.
Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by a team led by Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. The image combines 10 years of Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The size of the XDF on the sky is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon...
view full UCSC Press Release
September 24, 2012 — A Clock that Will Last Forever
Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever or a device that opens new dimensions into quantum phenomena such as emergence and entanglement.
Berkeley Lab Researchers Propose a Way to Build the First Space-Time Crystal
Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375 lcyarris@lbl.gov
Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances...
view full LBNL Press Release
Lynn Yarris (510) 486-5375 lcyarris@lbl.gov
Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances...
view full LBNL Press Release
September 24, 2012 — UC San Diego Astrophysicist Wins Hans Bethe Prize
George Fuller Credit: CASS, UC San Diego
By Kim McDonald
George Fuller, an astrophysicist and professor of physics who directs UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, known as CASS, has been selected to receive the 2013 Hans A. Bethe Prize.
The prestigious award is given annually by the American Physical Society to” recognize outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields.” The prize, which was established to honor Bethe, a renowned nuclear physicist at Cornell University, consists of $10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient.
Fuller was cited for “outstanding contributions to nuclear astrophysics, especially his seminal work on weak interaction rates for stellar evolution and collapse and his pioneering research on neutrino flavor-mixing in supernovae.” He will formally receive his award at a special session of the society’s April 2013 meeting in Denver...
view full UCSD Press Release
George Fuller, an astrophysicist and professor of physics who directs UC San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, known as CASS, has been selected to receive the 2013 Hans A. Bethe Prize.
The prestigious award is given annually by the American Physical Society to” recognize outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics, or closely related fields.” The prize, which was established to honor Bethe, a renowned nuclear physicist at Cornell University, consists of $10,000 and a certificate citing the contributions made by the recipient.
Fuller was cited for “outstanding contributions to nuclear astrophysics, especially his seminal work on weak interaction rates for stellar evolution and collapse and his pioneering research on neutrino flavor-mixing in supernovae.” He will formally receive his award at a special session of the society’s April 2013 meeting in Denver...
view full UCSD Press Release
September 17, 2012 — Berkeley Lab Sensors Enable First Light for the Dark Energy Camera
The Dark Energy Camera is mounted on the Victor Blanco 5-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo. Its focal plane consists of 62 large Berkeley Lab CCDs with exceptionally high sensitivity to the near infrared end of the spectrum. (Photos Roger Smith, NOAO, AURA, NSF; Blanco webcam; Fermilab; Roy Kaltschmidt, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)
DECam, the most powerful sky survey instrument yet built, depends on Berkeley Lab’s red-sensitive astronomical CCDs
Paul Preuss 510-486-6249 paul_preuss@lbl.gov
Early in the morning of September 12 the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies. Galaxies up to eight billion light years away were captured on DECam’s focal plane, whose imager consists of 62 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) invented and developed by engineers and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Berkeley Lab CCDs are noted for their exceptionally high sensitivity to light (quantum efficiency), particularly in the red and infrared regions of the spectrum – a crucial advantage for astronomical CCDs searching for objects at extremely high redshifts. Combining the 570-million-pixel focal plane made of Berkeley Lab CCDs with the light-gathering power of the Blanco telescope’s 4-meter mirror, DECam has unique ability to reach wide and deep into the night sky.
Paul Preuss 510-486-6249 paul_preuss@lbl.gov
Early in the morning of September 12 the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies. Galaxies up to eight billion light years away were captured on DECam’s focal plane, whose imager consists of 62 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) invented and developed by engineers and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Berkeley Lab CCDs are noted for their exceptionally high sensitivity to light (quantum efficiency), particularly in the red and infrared regions of the spectrum – a crucial advantage for astronomical CCDs searching for objects at extremely high redshifts. Combining the 570-million-pixel focal plane made of Berkeley Lab CCDs with the light-gathering power of the Blanco telescope’s 4-meter mirror, DECam has unique ability to reach wide and deep into the night sky.
September 4, 2012 — Halo of Neutrinos Alters Physics of Exploding Stars
Remnants of the collapsed supernova Cassiopeia A. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
By Susan Brown
Sparse halos of neutrinos within the hearts of exploding stars exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events.
John Cherry, a graduate student at UC San Diego, models stellar explosions, including a type called a core-collapse supernova. As these stars run out of fuel, their cores suddenly collapse to form a neutron star, which quickly rebounds sending seas of neutrinos through the surrounding stellar envelope and out into space.
Even as the collapsed core is rebounding, the rest of the star is still falling inward. Plumes of matter sink, accreting onto the core. “This matter is actually causing some small fraction of neutrinos to bounce at wide angles and cross the trajectories of neutrinos coming from the core,” Cherry said.
Sparse halos of neutrinos within the hearts of exploding stars exert a previously unrecognized influence on the physics of the explosion and may alter which elements can be forged by these violent events.
John Cherry, a graduate student at UC San Diego, models stellar explosions, including a type called a core-collapse supernova. As these stars run out of fuel, their cores suddenly collapse to form a neutron star, which quickly rebounds sending seas of neutrinos through the surrounding stellar envelope and out into space.
Even as the collapsed core is rebounding, the rest of the star is still falling inward. Plumes of matter sink, accreting onto the core. “This matter is actually causing some small fraction of neutrinos to bounce at wide angles and cross the trajectories of neutrinos coming from the core,” Cherry said.
September 4, 2012 — Explosion of galaxy formation lit up early universe
The South Pole Telescope recorded temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, the light left over from the Big Bang, to study the period of cosmological evolution when the first stars and galaxies formed early in the history of the universe. The image, only a third of which was used for the current analysis, shows variations in millionths of a degree Kelvin. (South Pole Telescope Collaboration)
By Robert Sanders
BERKELEY - New data from the South Pole Telescope indicates that the birth of the first massive galaxies that lit up the early universe was an explosive event, happening faster and ending sooner than suspected.
Extremely bright, active galaxies formed and fully illuminated the universe by the time it was 750 million years old, or about 13 billion years ago, according to Oliver Zahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP) at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the data analysis.
The data provide new constraints on the universe’s first era of galaxy formation, called the Epoch of Reionization. Most astronomers think that early stars came to life in massive gas clouds, generating the first galaxies. The energetic light pumped out by these stars is thought to have ionized the hydrogen gas in and around the galaxies, creating “ionization bubbles” millions of light years across that left a lasting, telltale signature in the cosmic background radiation (CMB). This relic light from the early universe is visible today everywhere in the sky and was first mapped by UC Berkeley physicist and Nobel laureate George Smoot, founder of the BCCP.
BERKELEY - New data from the South Pole Telescope indicates that the birth of the first massive galaxies that lit up the early universe was an explosive event, happening faster and ending sooner than suspected.
Extremely bright, active galaxies formed and fully illuminated the universe by the time it was 750 million years old, or about 13 billion years ago, according to Oliver Zahn, a postdoctoral fellow at the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics (BCCP) at the University of California, Berkeley, who led the data analysis.
The data provide new constraints on the universe’s first era of galaxy formation, called the Epoch of Reionization. Most astronomers think that early stars came to life in massive gas clouds, generating the first galaxies. The energetic light pumped out by these stars is thought to have ionized the hydrogen gas in and around the galaxies, creating “ionization bubbles” millions of light years across that left a lasting, telltale signature in the cosmic background radiation (CMB). This relic light from the early universe is visible today everywhere in the sky and was first mapped by UC Berkeley physicist and Nobel laureate George Smoot, founder of the BCCP.
October 31, 2012 — Protoplanet Vesta: Forever young?
This image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft features the distinctive crater Canuleia on the protoplanet Vesta. Canuleia, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, is distinguished by the rays of bright material that streak out from it.
By Jia-Rui C. Cook and Stuart Wolpert
Like a movie star constantly retouching her makeup, the protoplanet Vesta is continually stirring its outermost layer and presenting a young face.
New data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a common form of weathering that affects many airless bodies like Vesta in the inner solar system, including the moon, surprisingly doesn't age the protoplanet's outermost layer.
The data also indicate that carbon-rich asteroids have been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history.
view full UCLA Press Release
Like a movie star constantly retouching her makeup, the protoplanet Vesta is continually stirring its outermost layer and presenting a young face.
New data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a common form of weathering that affects many airless bodies like Vesta in the inner solar system, including the moon, surprisingly doesn't age the protoplanet's outermost layer.
The data also indicate that carbon-rich asteroids have been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history.
view full UCLA Press Release
August 30, 2012 — Celebrating astronomical success at UC Santa Cruz
"The 2012 Founders Celebration is a time to recognize extraordinary individuals and their outstanding contributions.
During this year's celebration, two major events—the Foundation Forum, featuring Martin Rees, United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, and the 12th annual Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture, featuring Sandra Faber, University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics professor at UCSC, will put astronomy studies in the spotlight.
UC Santa Cruz is the perfect place to host these high-profile events, considering its eminent status in this field. UCSC is one of the world's leading centers for both observational and theoretical research in astronomy and astrophysics.
Areas of special interest at UCSC include the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies, planet formation and extrasolar planets, cosmology (the origin and evolution of the universe), high-energy astrophysics, black holes, supernovae, and all aspects of observational optical and infrared astronomy..."
view full UCSC Press Release
During this year's celebration, two major events—the Foundation Forum, featuring Martin Rees, United Kingdom's Astronomer Royal, and the 12th annual Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture, featuring Sandra Faber, University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics professor at UCSC, will put astronomy studies in the spotlight.
UC Santa Cruz is the perfect place to host these high-profile events, considering its eminent status in this field. UCSC is one of the world's leading centers for both observational and theoretical research in astronomy and astrophysics.
Areas of special interest at UCSC include the formation and evolution of stars and galaxies, planet formation and extrasolar planets, cosmology (the origin and evolution of the universe), high-energy astrophysics, black holes, supernovae, and all aspects of observational optical and infrared astronomy..."
view full UCSC Press Release
August 23, 2012 — Supernovae of the same brightness, cut from vastly different cosmic cloth
The supernova PTF 11kx can be seen as the blue dot on the galaxy. The image was taken when the supernova was near maximum brightness by the Faulkes Telescope North. The system is located approximately 600 million light years away in the constellation Lynx. Image Credit: BJ Fulton (Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network)
"Berkeley Lab researchers make historic observation of rare Type 1a Supernova.
Exploding stars called Type 1a supernova are ideal for measuring cosmic distance because they are bright enough to spot across the Universe and have relatively the same luminosity everywhere. Although astronomers have many theories about the kinds of star systems involved in these explosions (or progenitor systems), no one has ever directly observed one—until now..."
view full LBL press Release
Exploding stars called Type 1a supernova are ideal for measuring cosmic distance because they are bright enough to spot across the Universe and have relatively the same luminosity everywhere. Although astronomers have many theories about the kinds of star systems involved in these explosions (or progenitor systems), no one has ever directly observed one—until now..."
view full LBL press Release
August 23, 2012 — New Findings Show Some Type Ia Supernovae Linked to Novae
Left: Host galaxy of PTF11kx before the supernova exploded as seen from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Right: the blue dot is the supernova near peak brightness as seen with LCOGT's Faulkes Telescope North. The supernova is 600 million lightyears away in the constellation Lynx. Credit: B.J. Fulton, LCOGT
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– In the August 24 issue of the journal Science, astronomers show for the first time that at least some thermonuclear (Type Ia) supernovae come from a recurrent nova. The results of the study, led by Ben Dilday, a postdoctoral researcher in physics at UC Santa Barbara and at Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), are surprising because previous indirect –– but strong –– evidence had pointed to the merger of two white dwarf stars as the originators of other Type Ia supernovae.
The authors conclude that there are multiple ways to make a Type Ia supernova –– a finding that could have implications for understanding the differences seen in these "standard candles," that were used to reveal the presence of dark energy.
Supernova PTF 11kx was discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) in a galaxy 600 million light years away –– relatively nearby in astronomical terms, but like all Type Ia supernovae, much too far away to make out the details of the stars before they exploded. However, the astronomers could discern that the supernova was surrounded by shells of gas, some of it containing hydrogen that had likely been cast off in previous nova eruptions, decades before the supernova occurred. These are much more frequent weak explosions that do not destroy the star. While similar shells of material had been seen before in a handful of Type Ia supernovae, their origin was debated, and they had never before been firmly linked to novae. Some doubted that the material was even near to the supernova at all...
view full UCSB Press Release
The authors conclude that there are multiple ways to make a Type Ia supernova –– a finding that could have implications for understanding the differences seen in these "standard candles," that were used to reveal the presence of dark energy.
Supernova PTF 11kx was discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) in a galaxy 600 million light years away –– relatively nearby in astronomical terms, but like all Type Ia supernovae, much too far away to make out the details of the stars before they exploded. However, the astronomers could discern that the supernova was surrounded by shells of gas, some of it containing hydrogen that had likely been cast off in previous nova eruptions, decades before the supernova occurred. These are much more frequent weak explosions that do not destroy the star. While similar shells of material had been seen before in a handful of Type Ia supernovae, their origin was debated, and they had never before been firmly linked to novae. Some doubted that the material was even near to the supernova at all...
view full UCSB Press Release
August 21, 2012 — Intense Bursts of Star Formation Drive Fierce Galactic Winds
Matter blasts out of the starburst galaxy M82 in this composite image from three observatories. Credit: Smithsonian Institution/Chandra X-ray Observatory
By Susan Brown
"Fierce galactic winds powered by an intense burst of star formation may blow gas right out of massive galaxies, shutting down their ability to make new stars.
Sifting through images and data from three telescopes, a team of astronomers found 29 objects with outflowing winds measuring up to 2,500 kilometers per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds.
“They’re nearly blowing themselves apart,” said Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, a fellow at the University of California’s Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, who led the study. “Most galactic winds are more like fountains; the outflowing gas will fall back onto the galaxies. With the high-velocity winds we’ve observed the outflowing gas will escape the galaxy and never return.” Diamond-Stanic and colleagues published their findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters..."
read full UCSD Press Release
"Fierce galactic winds powered by an intense burst of star formation may blow gas right out of massive galaxies, shutting down their ability to make new stars.
Sifting through images and data from three telescopes, a team of astronomers found 29 objects with outflowing winds measuring up to 2,500 kilometers per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds.
“They’re nearly blowing themselves apart,” said Aleksandar Diamond-Stanic, a fellow at the University of California’s Southern California Center for Galaxy Evolution, who led the study. “Most galactic winds are more like fountains; the outflowing gas will fall back onto the galaxies. With the high-velocity winds we’ve observed the outflowing gas will escape the galaxy and never return.” Diamond-Stanic and colleagues published their findings in Astrophysical Journal Letters..."
read full UCSD Press Release
August 13, 2012 — Gamma rays from galactic center could be evidence of dark matter
"UCI researchers say data from NASA telescope is of ‘high statistical significance’
— Irvine, Calif., August 13, 2012 —
Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are consistent with the intriguing possibility that dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to research submitted by UC Irvine astrophysicists to the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D.
Kevork Abazajian, assistant professor, and Manoj Kaplinghat, associate professor, of the Department of Physics & Astronomy analyzed data collected between August 2008 and June 2012 from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbiting Earth. They found more gamma-ray photons coming from the Milky Way galactic center than they had expected, based on previous scientific models. Gamma-rays are electromagnetic radiation emitted during radioactive decay or other high-energy particle processes.
“This is the first time this new source has been observed with such high statistical significance, and the most striking part is how the shape, spectrum and rate of the observed gamma rays are very consistent with the leading theories for dark matter,” Abazajian said. “Future observations of regions with less astrophysical emission, such as dwarf galaxies, will be able to conclusively determine if this is actually from the dark matter.”..."
view full UCI Press Release
— Irvine, Calif., August 13, 2012 —
Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are consistent with the intriguing possibility that dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to research submitted by UC Irvine astrophysicists to the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D.
Kevork Abazajian, assistant professor, and Manoj Kaplinghat, associate professor, of the Department of Physics & Astronomy analyzed data collected between August 2008 and June 2012 from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbiting Earth. They found more gamma-ray photons coming from the Milky Way galactic center than they had expected, based on previous scientific models. Gamma-rays are electromagnetic radiation emitted during radioactive decay or other high-energy particle processes.
“This is the first time this new source has been observed with such high statistical significance, and the most striking part is how the shape, spectrum and rate of the observed gamma rays are very consistent with the leading theories for dark matter,” Abazajian said. “Future observations of regions with less astrophysical emission, such as dwarf galaxies, will be able to conclusively determine if this is actually from the dark matter.”..."
view full UCI Press Release
July 24, 2012 — Theoretical astrophysicist receives $500,000+, no strings attached
Eliot Quataert, professor of astronomy and physics, has been named a Simons Investigator, one of the first class of 21 announced July 24.
"Berkeley - University of California, Berkeley, theoretical astrophysicist Eliot Quataert received an email out of the blue a few weeks ago offering him $100,000 a year for five to 10 years to pursue whatever research he wants.
After checking whether the email was a spoof, he accepted.
Offers from the Simons Foundation went out to 21 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists across the country, and the first group of Simons Investigators was announced today (Tuesday, July 24) in a paid ad in The New York Times. The Simons Foundation is a private foundation dedicated to advancing the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.
“I have to say that, in my 11 years at Berkeley, this was probably the single most surprising email I have received,” said Quataert, a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics and director of UC Berkeley’s Theoretical Astrophysics Center. “No complaints! What is particularly nice about this grant, from my perspective, is that the Simons Foundation is very flexible in how we can use the funds, which is wonderful because it gives me the opportunity and resources to really explore new research problems, which I like to do.”
As with the MacArthur Foundation “genius awards,” the recipients were unaware they were being considered for the award, and the money comes with no strings attached..."
view full UCB Press Release
After checking whether the email was a spoof, he accepted.
Offers from the Simons Foundation went out to 21 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists across the country, and the first group of Simons Investigators was announced today (Tuesday, July 24) in a paid ad in The New York Times. The Simons Foundation is a private foundation dedicated to advancing the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences.
“I have to say that, in my 11 years at Berkeley, this was probably the single most surprising email I have received,” said Quataert, a professor in the departments of astronomy and physics and director of UC Berkeley’s Theoretical Astrophysics Center. “No complaints! What is particularly nice about this grant, from my perspective, is that the Simons Foundation is very flexible in how we can use the funds, which is wonderful because it gives me the opportunity and resources to really explore new research problems, which I like to do.”
As with the MacArthur Foundation “genius awards,” the recipients were unaware they were being considered for the award, and the money comes with no strings attached..."
view full UCB Press Release
July 18, 2012 — Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope report the earliest spiral galaxy ever seen
Galaxy BX442 and its companion dwarf galaxy.
By Stuart Wolpert
Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.
"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of the study. "The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"
Galaxies in today’s universe divide into various types, including spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, which are rotating disks of stars and gas in which new stars form, and elliptical galaxies, which include older, redder stars moving in random directions. The mix of galaxy structures in the early universe is quite different, with a much greater diversity and larger fraction of irregular galaxies, Shapley said...
view full UCLA Press Release
Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a spiral galaxy in the early universe, billions of years before many other spiral galaxies formed. In findings reported July 19 in the journal Nature, the astronomers said they discovered it while using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of about 300 very distant galaxies in the early universe and to study their properties. This distant spiral galaxy is being observed as it existed roughly three billion years after the Big Bang, and light from this part of the universe has been traveling to Earth for about 10.7 billion years.
"As you go back in time to the early universe, galaxies look really strange, clumpy and irregular, not symmetric," said Alice Shapley, a UCLA associate professor of physics and astronomy, and co-author of the study. "The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks. Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?"
Galaxies in today’s universe divide into various types, including spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way, which are rotating disks of stars and gas in which new stars form, and elliptical galaxies, which include older, redder stars moving in random directions. The mix of galaxy structures in the early universe is quite different, with a much greater diversity and larger fraction of irregular galaxies, Shapley said...
view full UCLA Press Release
July 11, 2012 — Dark galaxies of the early universe spotted for the first time
This deep image shows the region of the sky around the quasar HE0109-3518 (labeled with a red circle near the centre of the image). The energetic radiation of the quasar makes dark galaxies glow. The faint images of the glow from 12 dark galaxies are labeled with blue circles. Image credit: ESO, Digitized Sky Survey 2, and S. Cantalupo (UCSC)
by Richard Hook, ESO
"For the first time, dark galaxies--an early phase of galaxy formation, predicted by theory but unobserved until now--may have been spotted. These objects are essentially gas-rich galaxies without stars. An international team has reported the possible detection of these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar. The team published their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"After several years of attempts to detect fluorescent emission from dark galaxies, our results demonstrate the potential of our method to discover and study these fascinating and previously invisible objects," said lead author Sebastiano Cantalupo, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz..."
view full UCSC Press Release
"For the first time, dark galaxies--an early phase of galaxy formation, predicted by theory but unobserved until now--may have been spotted. These objects are essentially gas-rich galaxies without stars. An international team has reported the possible detection of these elusive objects by observing them glowing as they are illuminated by a quasar. The team published their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"After several years of attempts to detect fluorescent emission from dark galaxies, our results demonstrate the potential of our method to discover and study these fascinating and previously invisible objects," said lead author Sebastiano Cantalupo, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Cruz..."
view full UCSC Press Release
July 05, 2012 — Astronomers discover Houdini-like vanishing act in space
Dust today, gone tomorrow. Lynette Cook
By Stuart Wolpert
Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.
"It's like the classic magician's trick — now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"
"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."
The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.
"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student. "The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event."...
view full UCLA Press Release
Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.
"It's like the classic magician's trick — now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"
"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."
The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.
"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student. "The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event."...
view full UCLA Press Release
June, 18, 2012 — Supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab passes 16 petaflops
From left to right in front of Sequoia: Bruce Goodwin, principal associate director for WCI, Dona Crawford, associate director for Computation, Michael Browne, IBM, Kim Cupps, leader of the Livermore Computing Division, and Michel McCoy, head of LLNL's Advanced Simulation and Computing program and deputy director for Computation.
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that a supercomputer called Sequoia at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) was ranked the world's most powerful computing system.
Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the No. 1 ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM...
view LNLL Press Release
Clocking in at 16.32 sustained petaflops (quadrillion floating point operations per second), Sequoia earned the No. 1 ranking on the industry standard Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers released Monday, June 18, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC12) in Hamburg, Germany. Sequoia was built for NNSA by IBM...
view LNLL Press Release
June 13, 2012 — Astronomer Jerry Nelson receives Franklin Medal in campus ceremony
Jerry Nelson at the award ceremony in his honor. (Photos by E. Arvizu)
by Tim Stephens
Astronomer Jerry Nelson received the Franklin Institute's 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in a ceremony at UC Santa Cruz on Friday, June 8.
The Franklin Institute Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious comprehensive science awards in the world. Frederic Bertley, vice president for science and innovation at the Franklin Institute, traveled to UC Santa Cruz to present Nelson's medal to him in person. Nelson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, was unable to travel to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for an awards ceremony and related events in April.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal and astronomer Sandra Faber both shared memories of working with Nelson over the years in remarks before a large crowd of astronomy faculty and students at the Center for Adaptive Optics. Faber, winner of the Franklin Institute's 2009 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, joked that the institute "once again has shown excellent taste in choosing award winners."
http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/06/nelson-medal.html
Astronomer Jerry Nelson received the Franklin Institute's 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering in a ceremony at UC Santa Cruz on Friday, June 8.
The Franklin Institute Awards are among the oldest and most prestigious comprehensive science awards in the world. Frederic Bertley, vice president for science and innovation at the Franklin Institute, traveled to UC Santa Cruz to present Nelson's medal to him in person. Nelson, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC, was unable to travel to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for an awards ceremony and related events in April.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal and astronomer Sandra Faber both shared memories of working with Nelson over the years in remarks before a large crowd of astronomy faculty and students at the Center for Adaptive Optics. Faber, winner of the Franklin Institute's 2009 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, joked that the institute "once again has shown excellent taste in choosing award winners."
http://news.ucsc.edu/2012/06/nelson-medal.html
June 01, 2012 — Astronomer Sandra Faber receives prestigious Bruce Gold Medal
UCSC astronomer Sandra Faber (center) received the 2012 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal from William Gutsch (left), board president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and ASP executive director James Manning (right). Photo by Carolyn Lagattuta.
Astronomical Society of the Pacific honors Faber for lifetime achievement in research
By Tim Stephens
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), one of the oldest and most respected astronomy societies in the United States, has awarded the 2012 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal to Sandra Faber, University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. The award recognizes Faber for her lifetime achievements in astronomical research.
ASP executive director James Manning and ASP board president William Gutsch came to UC Santa Cruz on Thursday, May 31, to present the medal to Faber in a ceremony at the Center for Adaptive Optics. "Professor Faber has influenced observational cosmology in extraordinary ways over the past 30 years," Manning said. "We are very pleased to recognize her achievements and hope that her remarkable career serves to inspire those who wish to explore and seek greater understanding of our world and the worlds around us."...
view full UCSC Press Release
By Tim Stephens
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), one of the oldest and most respected astronomy societies in the United States, has awarded the 2012 Catherine Wolfe Bruce Gold Medal to Sandra Faber, University Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. The award recognizes Faber for her lifetime achievements in astronomical research.
ASP executive director James Manning and ASP board president William Gutsch came to UC Santa Cruz on Thursday, May 31, to present the medal to Faber in a ceremony at the Center for Adaptive Optics. "Professor Faber has influenced observational cosmology in extraordinary ways over the past 30 years," Manning said. "We are very pleased to recognize her achievements and hope that her remarkable career serves to inspire those who wish to explore and seek greater understanding of our world and the worlds around us."...
view full UCSC Press Release
May 31, 2012 — Milky Way destined for head-on collision with Andromeda galaxy
The night sky 4 billion years from now would look something like this as the Andromeda galaxy begins to collide and merge with the Milky Way. The image is based on dynamical computer modeling of the future collision between the two galaxies. Illustration Credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay (STScI), and O. Mellinger.
By Tim Stephens
Our galactic neighbor the Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with our own Milky Way galaxy, according to new observations by a team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also called M31, the Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the largest in the local group of galaxies.
Painstaking measurements of its motion show that it will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now. M31 is now 2.5 million light-years away, but inexorably drifting ever nearer to us under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies.
Puragra Guhathakurta, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, said astronomers have long speculated that the two galaxies would eventually collide. "Now we've shown that a collision is inevitable," he said...
view full UCSC Press Release
Our galactic neighbor the Andromeda galaxy is on a collision course with our own Milky Way galaxy, according to new observations by a team of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Also called M31, the Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and the largest in the local group of galaxies.
Painstaking measurements of its motion show that it will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now. M31 is now 2.5 million light-years away, but inexorably drifting ever nearer to us under the mutual pull of gravity between the two galaxies.
Puragra Guhathakurta, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, said astronomers have long speculated that the two galaxies would eventually collide. "Now we've shown that a collision is inevitable," he said...
view full UCSC Press Release
May 16, 2012 — Three-Telescope Interferometry Allows Astrophysicists to Observe How Black Holes are Fueled
Artist's view of a dust torus surrounding the accretion disk and the central black hole in active galactic nuclei. Credit: NASA E/PO - Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet (http://epo.sonoma.edu/)
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of galaxies.
"This three-telescope interferometry is a major milestone toward directly imaging the growth phase of supermassive black holes," said Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Physics, and one of the astrophysicists who utilized this technique to observe the AGN at the center of galaxy NGC 3783. The observation was led by Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany...
view full UCSB Press Release
"This three-telescope interferometry is a major milestone toward directly imaging the growth phase of supermassive black holes," said Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the UC Santa Barbara Department of Physics, and one of the astrophysicists who utilized this technique to observe the AGN at the center of galaxy NGC 3783. The observation was led by Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany...
view full UCSB Press Release
May 16, 2012 — Science Underground: Going to Great Depths
The tunnel on the left is the entrance to the cavern that will house the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR neutrino experiment and also provides access to the LUX experiment, which is searching for particles of dark matter. The tunnel to the right is a separate entrance to the cavern in which Ray Davis performed his famous neutrino experiment, now modified to house LUX. (Photo Matt Kapust)
Science Underground: Going to Great Depths
The Davis Campus of the Sanford Underground Research Facility -- the Halls of Ivy it’s not.
The word “campus” brings to mind neo-Gothic bell towers and green lawns, not tunnels and caverns almost a mile underground. But that’s what the Davis Campus at the Sanford Underground Research Facility looks like, 4,850 feet down in the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Although SURF has weathered a series of funding ups and downs worthy of the rise and fall of the elevator cages that once took miners, and now scientists, to work in the mine, last year the U.S. Department of Energy successfully assumed sponsorship of the Sanford Lab’s scientific program from the National Science Foundation. DOE will maintain the mine as a home for existing and proposed projects to investigate dark matter, the secrets of the elusive neutrino, and other research that can only be done deep down in the dark...
view full LBL feature
The Davis Campus of the Sanford Underground Research Facility -- the Halls of Ivy it’s not.
The word “campus” brings to mind neo-Gothic bell towers and green lawns, not tunnels and caverns almost a mile underground. But that’s what the Davis Campus at the Sanford Underground Research Facility looks like, 4,850 feet down in the Homestake Mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Although SURF has weathered a series of funding ups and downs worthy of the rise and fall of the elevator cages that once took miners, and now scientists, to work in the mine, last year the U.S. Department of Energy successfully assumed sponsorship of the Sanford Lab’s scientific program from the National Science Foundation. DOE will maintain the mine as a home for existing and proposed projects to investigate dark matter, the secrets of the elusive neutrino, and other research that can only be done deep down in the dark...
view full LBL feature
May 10, 2012 — You're beautiful, Vesta
Craters on Vesta
NASA's UCLA-led Dawn mission shows protoplanet's surprising surface
When UCLA's Christopher T. Russell looks at the images of the protoplanet Vesta produced by NASA's Dawn mission, he talks about beauty as much as he talks about science.
"Vesta looks like a little planet. It has a beautiful surface, much more varied and diverse than we expected," said Russell, a professor in UCLA's Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Dawn mission's principal investigator. "We knew Vesta's surface had some variation in color, but we did not expect the diversity that we see or the clarity of the colors and textures, or their distinct boundaries. We didn't find gold on Vesta, but it is still a gold mine."
Dawn has been orbiting Vesta and collecting data on the protoplanet's surface since July 2011. Vesta, which is in the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is currently some 321 million miles from Earth.
The journal Science publishes six papers about Vesta on May 11. Russell is a co-author on all of them...
view full UCLA Press Release
When UCLA's Christopher T. Russell looks at the images of the protoplanet Vesta produced by NASA's Dawn mission, he talks about beauty as much as he talks about science.
"Vesta looks like a little planet. It has a beautiful surface, much more varied and diverse than we expected," said Russell, a professor in UCLA's Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Dawn mission's principal investigator. "We knew Vesta's surface had some variation in color, but we did not expect the diversity that we see or the clarity of the colors and textures, or their distinct boundaries. We didn't find gold on Vesta, but it is still a gold mine."
Dawn has been orbiting Vesta and collecting data on the protoplanet's surface since July 2011. Vesta, which is in the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is currently some 321 million miles from Earth.
The journal Science publishes six papers about Vesta on May 11. Russell is a co-author on all of them...
view full UCLA Press Release
May 09, 2012 — UCLA's Andrea Ghez, Terence Tao elected to American Philosophical Society
Tao (left) and Ghez
By Stuart Wolpert
Renowned UCLA scientists Andrea Ghez, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics, have been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the country's oldest learned society, which recognizes extraordinary achievements in science, letters and the arts.
Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, the society's members have included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, Linus Pauling and Margaret Mead.
Next week, Ghez and Tao will be in Lund, Sweden, for another honor: Each will receive the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' prestigious Crafoord Prize in the presence of the king and queen of Sweden. The prize recognizes extraordinary achievements in mathematics, astronomy and other fields.
Joseph Rudnick, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences, has called Ghez and Tao "two of UCLA's true superstars — indeed, two of the world's intellectual superstars."...
view full UCLA Press Release
Renowned UCLA scientists Andrea Ghez, a professor of physics and astronomy, and Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics, have been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the country's oldest learned society, which recognizes extraordinary achievements in science, letters and the arts.
Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, the society's members have included George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Louis Pasteur, Linus Pauling and Margaret Mead.
Next week, Ghez and Tao will be in Lund, Sweden, for another honor: Each will receive the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' prestigious Crafoord Prize in the presence of the king and queen of Sweden. The prize recognizes extraordinary achievements in mathematics, astronomy and other fields.
Joseph Rudnick, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences, has called Ghez and Tao "two of UCLA's true superstars — indeed, two of the world's intellectual superstars."...
view full UCLA Press Release
April 25, 2012 — “NASA Scientists Find History of Asteroid Impacts in Earth Rocks"
Research by NASA and international scientists concludes giant asteroids, similar or larger than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, hit Earth billions of years ago with more frequency than previously thought. Computer models of the ancient main asteroid belt ran at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division.
view NASA Ames Press Release
view NASA Ames Press Release
April 25, 2012 — Huffman Prize winner helps develop better tools for analyzing "big data"
Senior Joshua Rosen, winner of the 2012 Huffman Prize. (Photo by C. Lagattuta)
By Tim Stephens
When UC Santa Cruz computer scientist Neoklis Polyzotis first had Joshua Rosen as a student in one of his classes, he initially thought Rosen was a graduate student taking the class as a refresher. "Josh was head and shoulders above his classmates in terms of his understanding of the material, his ability to think critically, and his technical prowess," said Polyzotis, an associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering.
In fact, Rosen was not a graduate student, but a junior transfer from Cabrillo College who happened to have an exceptional aptitude for computer science. Polyzotis promptly invited him to work on a research project, and before long Rosen was deeply involved in a collaborative project with researchers at UC Irvine and Yahoo Research to develop better tools for large-scale data processing. In addition to his productive engagement in this research, Rosen managed to rack up an impressive 15 A+ grades and four A's in his classes at UC Santa Cruz.
Rosen is the 2012 winner of the Huffman Prize, awarded annually to a Baskin School of Engineering graduating senior whose academic career at UCSC exhibits extraordinary creativity, depth of inquiry, and overall excellence. The Huffman Prize honors the memory and the legacy of its namesake, David A. Huffman, professor emeritus of computer science. "Joshua is a student that David Huffman would have loved to have in his class, and I'm sure Joshua would have loved learning from David," said Charlie McDowell, professor of computer science and associate dean for undergraduate affairs in the Baskin School of Engineering...
view full UCSC Press Release
When UC Santa Cruz computer scientist Neoklis Polyzotis first had Joshua Rosen as a student in one of his classes, he initially thought Rosen was a graduate student taking the class as a refresher. "Josh was head and shoulders above his classmates in terms of his understanding of the material, his ability to think critically, and his technical prowess," said Polyzotis, an associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering.
In fact, Rosen was not a graduate student, but a junior transfer from Cabrillo College who happened to have an exceptional aptitude for computer science. Polyzotis promptly invited him to work on a research project, and before long Rosen was deeply involved in a collaborative project with researchers at UC Irvine and Yahoo Research to develop better tools for large-scale data processing. In addition to his productive engagement in this research, Rosen managed to rack up an impressive 15 A+ grades and four A's in his classes at UC Santa Cruz.
Rosen is the 2012 winner of the Huffman Prize, awarded annually to a Baskin School of Engineering graduating senior whose academic career at UCSC exhibits extraordinary creativity, depth of inquiry, and overall excellence. The Huffman Prize honors the memory and the legacy of its namesake, David A. Huffman, professor emeritus of computer science. "Joshua is a student that David Huffman would have loved to have in his class, and I'm sure Joshua would have loved learning from David," said Charlie McDowell, professor of computer science and associate dean for undergraduate affairs in the Baskin School of Engineering...
view full UCSC Press Release
April 25, 2012 — A fusion of art and science
UCSC's OpenLab program blends disciplines for new approaches to solving problems
By John C. Cannon
Last summer, visitors at the Tech Museum in San Jose had the chance to step off our planet and hurl a star into the cosmos.
On a screen in front of them lay a black hole waiting to yank in an errant star that visitors attempted to throw toward it at just the right angle and speed. A star isn’t sucked in and gobbled up by a black hole very often—in real life, only once every hundred thousand years or so. But when a museum visitor’s thrown star was destroyed—what astronomers refer to as “tidal disruption”—the screen on the wall exploded in a concussive burst of red light.
Using a Nintendo Wii remote connecting the user to the display, the game was just one result of collaborations between scientists and artists from UC Santa Cruz through a project called OpenLab.
The idea of OpenLab is simple: Bring together a group of specialists from different disciplines and task them with leveraging each other’s strengths to create new ways to visualize scientific research. What often results is a uniquely interactive work of art that changes the way its viewers think about difficult-to-understand concepts. In this case, “They will remember forever that they themselves disrupted a star,” says Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, who co-founded OpenLab...
view full UCSC review
By John C. Cannon
Last summer, visitors at the Tech Museum in San Jose had the chance to step off our planet and hurl a star into the cosmos.
On a screen in front of them lay a black hole waiting to yank in an errant star that visitors attempted to throw toward it at just the right angle and speed. A star isn’t sucked in and gobbled up by a black hole very often—in real life, only once every hundred thousand years or so. But when a museum visitor’s thrown star was destroyed—what astronomers refer to as “tidal disruption”—the screen on the wall exploded in a concussive burst of red light.
Using a Nintendo Wii remote connecting the user to the display, the game was just one result of collaborations between scientists and artists from UC Santa Cruz through a project called OpenLab.
The idea of OpenLab is simple: Bring together a group of specialists from different disciplines and task them with leveraging each other’s strengths to create new ways to visualize scientific research. What often results is a uniquely interactive work of art that changes the way its viewers think about difficult-to-understand concepts. In this case, “They will remember forever that they themselves disrupted a star,” says Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics, who co-founded OpenLab...
view full UCSC review
April 18, 2012 — Where Do the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Come From? Probably Not from Gamma-Ray Bursts
IceCube’s 5,160 digital optical modules are suspended from 86 strings reaching a mile and a half below the surface at the South Pole. Each sphere contains a photomultiplier tube and electronics to capture the faint flashes of muons speeding through the ice, their direction and energy – and thus that of the neutrinos that created them – tracked by multiple detections. At lower left is the processed signal of an energetic muon moving upward through the array, created by a neutrino that traveled all the way through the Earth.
The IceCube Collaboration, in which Berkeley Lab is a crucial contributor, has taken the first steps toward clearing up a cosmic mystery – and made the mystery more intriguing
The IceCube neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice under the South Pole, a volume seeded with an array of 5,160 sensitive digital optical modules (DOMs) that precisely track the direction and energy of speeding muons, massive cousins of the electron that are created when neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice. The IceCube Collaboration recently announced the results of an exhaustive search for high-energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extragalactic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
“According to a leading model, we would have expected to see 8.4 events corresponding to GRB production of neutrinos in the IceCube data used for this search,” says Spencer Klein of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who is a long-time member of the IceCube Collaboration. “We didn’t see any, which indicates that GRBs are not the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.”
view full LBNL Press Release
The IceCube neutrino telescope encompasses a cubic kilometer of clear Antarctic ice under the South Pole, a volume seeded with an array of 5,160 sensitive digital optical modules (DOMs) that precisely track the direction and energy of speeding muons, massive cousins of the electron that are created when neutrinos collide with atoms in the ice. The IceCube Collaboration recently announced the results of an exhaustive search for high-energy neutrinos that would likely be produced if the violent extragalactic explosions known as gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
“According to a leading model, we would have expected to see 8.4 events corresponding to GRB production of neutrinos in the IceCube data used for this search,” says Spencer Klein of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), who is a long-time member of the IceCube Collaboration. “We didn’t see any, which indicates that GRBs are not the source of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.”
view full LBNL Press Release
April 11, 2012 — 'Time machine' will study the early universe
MOSFIRE image of colliding Atennae galaxies
UCLA's Ian McLean, colleagues build most advanced instrument of its kind
By Stuart Wolpert
A new scientific instrument, a "time machine" of sorts, built by UCLA astronomers and colleagues, will allow scientists to study the earliest galaxies in the universe, which could never be studied before.
The five-ton instrument, the most advanced and sophisticated of its kind in the world, goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) and has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
MOSFIRE gathers light in infrared wavelengths — invisible to the human eye — allowing it to penetrate cosmic dust and see distant objects whose light has been stretched or "redshifted" to the infrared by the expansion of the universe.
"The instrument was designed to study the most distant, faintest galaxies," said UCLA physics and astronomy professor Ian S. McLean, project leader on MOSFIRE and director of UCLA's Infrared Laboratory for Astrophysics. "When we look at the most distant galaxies, we see them not as they are now but as they were when the light left them that is just now arriving here. Some of the galaxies that we are studying were formed some 10 billion years ago — only a few billion years after the Big Bang. We are looking back in time to the era of the formation of some of the very first galaxies, which are small and very faint. That is an era that we need to study if we are going to understand the large-scale structure of the universe."
With MOSFIRE, it will now become much easier to identify faint galaxies, "families of galaxies" and merging galaxies. The instrument also will enable detailed observations of planets orbiting nearby stars, star formation within our own galaxy, the distribution of dark matter in the universe and much more...
view full UCLA Press Release
By Stuart Wolpert
A new scientific instrument, a "time machine" of sorts, built by UCLA astronomers and colleagues, will allow scientists to study the earliest galaxies in the universe, which could never be studied before.
The five-ton instrument, the most advanced and sophisticated of its kind in the world, goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) and has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
MOSFIRE gathers light in infrared wavelengths — invisible to the human eye — allowing it to penetrate cosmic dust and see distant objects whose light has been stretched or "redshifted" to the infrared by the expansion of the universe.
"The instrument was designed to study the most distant, faintest galaxies," said UCLA physics and astronomy professor Ian S. McLean, project leader on MOSFIRE and director of UCLA's Infrared Laboratory for Astrophysics. "When we look at the most distant galaxies, we see them not as they are now but as they were when the light left them that is just now arriving here. Some of the galaxies that we are studying were formed some 10 billion years ago — only a few billion years after the Big Bang. We are looking back in time to the era of the formation of some of the very first galaxies, which are small and very faint. That is an era that we need to study if we are going to understand the large-scale structure of the universe."
With MOSFIRE, it will now become much easier to identify faint galaxies, "families of galaxies" and merging galaxies. The instrument also will enable detailed observations of planets orbiting nearby stars, star formation within our own galaxy, the distribution of dark matter in the universe and much more...
view full UCLA Press Release
April 3, 2012 — Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips
The Kepler Explorer app is part of an exhibit to be installed at the Lick Observatory visitors gallery.
By Tim Stephens
Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Kepler Explorer, an innovative app for iPads and iPhones developed by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides interactive displays of newly discovered planetary systems based on Kepler data.
Now available for free from the iTunes App Store, Kepler Explorer was developed through the OpenLab initiative at UC Santa Cruz, which brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year. The Kepler Explorer team includes astrophysicist Jonathan Fortney, a member of the Kepler science team; two of his graduate students, Eric Lopez and Caroline Morley; artist Kyle McKinley, a recent graduate of the Digital Arts and New Media program; and John Peters, a recent graduate of the computer game design program.
"I learned a lot about astrophysics from this project. It was a lot of fun," said Peters, who wrote all of the software code for the app...
view full UCSC Press Release
Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Kepler Explorer, an innovative app for iPads and iPhones developed by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides interactive displays of newly discovered planetary systems based on Kepler data.
Now available for free from the iTunes App Store, Kepler Explorer was developed through the OpenLab initiative at UC Santa Cruz, which brought together faculty and students in astrophysics, art, and technology for a summer institute last year. The Kepler Explorer team includes astrophysicist Jonathan Fortney, a member of the Kepler science team; two of his graduate students, Eric Lopez and Caroline Morley; artist Kyle McKinley, a recent graduate of the Digital Arts and New Media program; and John Peters, a recent graduate of the computer game design program.
"I learned a lot about astrophysics from this project. It was a lot of fun," said Peters, who wrote all of the software code for the app...
view full UCSC Press Release
April 2, 2012 — Simulating the stars
NAS visualization and data analysis expert Chris Henze, with Kepler mission engineer Todd Klaus, explain their techniques for processing 'astronomical' amounts of star data on the Pleiades supercomputer.
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March 30, 2012 — Clocking an Accelerating Universe: First Results from BOSS
BOSS measures the three-dimensional clustering of galaxies at various redshifts, revealing their precise distance, the age of the universe at that redshift, and how fast the universe has expanded. The measurement uses a "standard ruler" based on the regular variations of the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which reveal variations in the density of matter in the early universe that gave rise to the later clustering of galaxies and large-scale structure of the universe today. (Click on image for best resolution. Credit: Eric Huff, the SDSS-III team, and the South Pole Telescope team. Graphic by Zosia Rostomian)
Berkeley Lab scientists are the leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on.
Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.
Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on.
“We’ve made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago – the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way,” says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS’s principal investigator. “We’re pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what’s causing accelerating expansion.”...
view full LBNL Press Release
Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been expanding ever more slowly. Then, as matter spread out and its density decreased, dark energy took over and expansion began to accelerate.
Today BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), announced the most accurate measurement yet of the distance scale of the universe during the era when dark energy turned on.
“We’ve made precision measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe five to seven billion years ago – the best measure yet of the size of anything outside the Milky Way,” says David Schlegel of the Physics Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BOSS’s principal investigator. “We’re pushing out to the distances when dark energy turned on, where we can start to do experiments to find out what’s causing accelerating expansion.”...
view full LBNL Press Release
March 29, 2012 — Data Mining Deep Space
The Hubble Space Telescope. NASA
UC Riverside’s Bahram Mobasher has received a NASA grant to compile data from the Hubble Space Telescope
By Iqbal Pittalwala
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Bahram Mobasher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from NASA to compile into a data bank all the imaging observations of galaxy surveys that the Hubble Space Telescope has performed since 2002, when a powerful imaging instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, was installed on the telescope.
Carried into orbit in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope still remains in operation, and is one of the world’s most famous, popular and productive scientific instruments. Because of its orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere, it is capable of taking extremely sharp images of galaxies in the most distant parts of the universe.
“This is a tremendously exciting data-mining project, a legacy program with a final product enormously useful for astronomers worldwide,” Mobasher said.
The Hubble imaging data will be supplemented by observations for the same galaxies in different wavelengths, taken from other ground-based and space-borne observatories...
view full UCR Press Release
By Iqbal Pittalwala
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Bahram Mobasher, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has received a two-year $200,000 grant from NASA to compile into a data bank all the imaging observations of galaxy surveys that the Hubble Space Telescope has performed since 2002, when a powerful imaging instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, was installed on the telescope.
Carried into orbit in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope still remains in operation, and is one of the world’s most famous, popular and productive scientific instruments. Because of its orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere, it is capable of taking extremely sharp images of galaxies in the most distant parts of the universe.
“This is a tremendously exciting data-mining project, a legacy program with a final product enormously useful for astronomers worldwide,” Mobasher said.
The Hubble imaging data will be supplemented by observations for the same galaxies in different wavelengths, taken from other ground-based and space-borne observatories...
view full UCR Press Release
March 8, 2012 — New discovery is key to understanding neutrino transformations
The inside of a cylindrical antineutrino detector before being filled with clear liquid scintillator, which reveals antineutrino interactions by the very faint flashes of light they emit. Sensitive photomultiplier tubes line the detector walls, ready to amplify and record the telltale flashes. (Roy Kaltschmidt photo, LBNL)
BERKELEY - A new discovery provides a crucial key to understanding how neutrinos – ghostly particles with multiple personalities – change identity and may help shed light on why matter exists in the universe.
view UCB Press Release
view LBNL Press Release
March 6, 2012 — Searching for Sister Planets
The discovery that planets orbit the Sun in ellipses, rather than circles, was made by 16th century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler using only the observations of his predecessors and his own unique calculations—without the aid of the yet-to-be invented telescope and long before modern computers were dreamed of.
Today, with the help of one of NASA's largest space telescopes and its most powerful supercomputer, scientists are analyzing observational data gathered from that pioneering astronomer's modern-day namesake—the Kepler mission spacecraft—to search the skies for Earth's sister planets and make new astronomical discoveries.
Today, with the help of one of NASA's largest space telescopes and its most powerful supercomputer, scientists are analyzing observational data gathered from that pioneering astronomer's modern-day namesake—the Kepler mission spacecraft—to search the skies for Earth's sister planets and make new astronomical discoveries.
March 5, 2012 — SDSC’s ‘Gordon’ Supercomputer: Ready for Researchers
SDSC's Gordon Supercomputer. Photo: Alan Decker.
Accurately predicting severe storms, or what Wall Street’s markets will do next, may become just a bit easier in coming months as Gordon, a unique supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, begins helping researchers delve into these and other data-intensive projects.
Following acceptance testing in January, Gordon has now begun serving University of California and national academic researchers as well as industry and government agencies. Named for its massive amounts of flash-based memory, Gordon is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE program, a nationwide partnership comprising 16 supercomputers and high-end visualization and data analysis resources...
view SDSC Press Release
Following acceptance testing in January, Gordon has now begun serving University of California and national academic researchers as well as industry and government agencies. Named for its massive amounts of flash-based memory, Gordon is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, or XSEDE program, a nationwide partnership comprising 16 supercomputers and high-end visualization and data analysis resources...
view SDSC Press Release
March 2, 2012 — Dark matter's odd behavior baffles astronomers
In this false color image of merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, the clump of green and blue in the center shows that, unexpectedly, most of the dark matter has remained in the middle of the collision instead of passing through with the galaxies. (NASA/photo)
New results from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm that, contrary to predictions, dark matter -- the invisible substance that makes up much of our universe -- and galaxies parted ways in the collision of two galaxy clusters 2.4 billion light-years away. Now, astronomers are left trying to explain dark matter's seemingly oddball behavior in the Abell 520 merging galaxy cluster...
March 1, 2012 — SDSC, UC-HiPACC to Host Summer School on Astroinformatics SDSC's 'Gordon' Supercomputer to be used for Astronomical Data Studies; Applications due this month (March)
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, in conjunction with the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC- HiPACC), will host a two-week long summer school designed to help the next generation of astronomers manage the ever-increasing amount of data generated by new instruments, digital sky surveys, and simulations...more
View the SDSC Press Release
View the Summer School website
February 08, 2012 — New images capture 'stealth merger' of dwarf galaxies
The dwarf galaxy NGC 4449 is the first dwarf galaxy with an identified stellar stream (faintly seen at the lower right, and in inset). The star stream represents the remains of a smaller satellite galaxy merging with NGC 4449. The inset image shows the stream resolved into red giant stars. Image credit and copyright: R. Jay Gabany (Black Bird Obs.); Insert credit: Subaru/Suprime-Cam (NAOJ).
New images of a nearby dwarf galaxy have revealed a dense stream of stars in its outer regions, the remains of an even smaller companion galaxy in the process of merging with its host. The host galaxy, known as NGC 4449, is the smallest primary galaxy in which a stellar stream from an ongoing merger has been identified and studied in detail.
view UCSC Press Release
February 02, 2012 — New super-Earth detected within the habitable zone of a nearby star
The newly discovered planet is depicted in this artist's conception, showing the host star as part of a triple-star system. The diagram below shows the orbits of the detected planets around the host star in relation to the habitable zone. (Images courtesy of Guillem Anglada-Escudé, Carnegie Institution)
An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star's "habitable zone," where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet's surface. The researchers found evidence of at least one and possibly two or three additional planets orbiting the star, which is about 22 light years from Earth...
February 1, 2012 — LLNL: Scientists help define structure of exoplanets
The planet GJ 1214b, shown here in an artist's conception with two hypothetical moons, orbits a "red dwarf" star 40 light-years away from Earth.
LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Using models similar to those used in weapons research, scientists may soon know more about exoplanets, those objects beyond the realm of our solar system.
In a new study, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists and collaborators came up with new methods for deriving and testing the equation of state (EOS) of matter in exoplanets and figured out the mass-radius and mass-pressure relations for materials relevant to planetary interiors...more
January 26, 2012 — NASA's Kepler mission announces 11 planetary systems hosting 26 planets
This image (from video below) shows the known planetary systems with more than one planet transiting. Credit: Daniel Fabrycky.
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of, its host star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form...
January 18, 2012 — Faint 'satellite galaxy' discovered
The image of a distant galaxy (blue) is lensed into a ring shape by the gravity of a galaxy closer to Earth (yellow). By looking at the image of the background galaxy, astronomers detected the presence of a faint satellite galaxy around the lens galaxy. (Chris Fassnacht/UC Davis graphic)
A faint “satellite galaxy” 10 billion light years from Earth is the lowest-mass object ever detected at such a distance, says University of California, Davis, physics professor Chris Fassnacht, who aided in the satellite’s discovery.
The find, described in a paper published online today (Jan. 18) in the journal Nature, could help astronomers find similar objects and confirm or reject theories about the structure of the cosmos...
The find, described in a paper published online today (Jan. 18) in the journal Nature, could help astronomers find similar objects and confirm or reject theories about the structure of the cosmos...
January 11, 2012 — Calculating What’s in the Universe from the Biggest Color 3-D Map
This image shows over a million luminous galaxies at redshifts indicating times when the universe was between seven and eleven billion years old, from which the sample in the current studies was selected. (By David Kirkby of the University of California at Irvine and the SDSS collaboration.)
Berkeley Lab scientists and their Sloan Digital Sky Survey colleagues use galactic brightness to build a precision model of the cosmos
Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their SDSS colleagues, working with DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) based at Berkeley Lab, have used this visual information for the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together – from a time when the universe was only half its present age until now...
Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their SDSS colleagues, working with DOE’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) based at Berkeley Lab, have used this visual information for the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together – from a time when the universe was only half its present age until now...
January 10, 2012 — When galaxy clusters collide
This image of merging galaxy clusters taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows that the "North" and "South" clusters have passed through each other. Blue coloring shows dark matter, and red shows gas clouds which have collided in the middle. (William Dawson, UC Davis graphic)
A UC Davis graduate student who is leading a study of the collision of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away will discuss the team’s findings today, Jan. 10, in a press briefing at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas.
“A galaxy cluster is like a little universe, because it has the same matter composition as the whole universe,” said William Dawson, a Ph.D. candidate in physics. “By studying this little universe, we can learn more about our own.”...
“A galaxy cluster is like a little universe, because it has the same matter composition as the whole universe,” said William Dawson, a Ph.D. candidate in physics. “By studying this little universe, we can learn more about our own.”...
January 09, 2012 — Wandering stars offer clues to history of our galaxy
Measurements of the metal content of stars in the disk of our galaxy. The bottom panel shows the decrease in metal content as the distance from the galactic center increases for stars near the plane of the Milky Way disk. In contrast, the metal content for stars far above the plane, shown in the upper panel, is nearly constant at all distances from the center of the Galaxy. Image Credit: Judy Cheng and Connie Rockosi (UCSC) and the 2MASS Survey.
Some stars have orbits that take them to interesting places, and they have interesting stories to tell about how they were formed.
For more than a decade, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been mapping the stars in our galaxy. At the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Austin, Texas, UC Santa Cruz astronomers Judy Cheng and Connie Rockosi presented new evidence that will help answer long-standing questions about the history of the stars in the disk of our galaxy...
For more than a decade, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been mapping the stars in our galaxy. At the American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Austin, Texas, UC Santa Cruz astronomers Judy Cheng and Connie Rockosi presented new evidence that will help answer long-standing questions about the history of the stars in the disk of our galaxy...
Jan. 3, 2012 — A Stellar Discovery
It takes more than luck to find a supernova. Here’s a look behind the scenes.
On August 24, astrophysicist Peter Nugent was playing a little catch-up. Nugent, an adjunct professor at Berkeley and group leader of the Computational Cosmology Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, settled in to look at data collected overnight by the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF). This fully automated survey based at Caltech searches for transients, a catch-all term for as yet unidentified astronomical objects that suddenly appear, change, and fade away.
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December 22, 2011 — Astronomers' pristine gas discovery among top scientific breakthroughs of 2011
The newly discovered gas clouds may be part of a "cold flow" of gas similar to the streams seen in this simulation by Ceverino, Dekel, and Primack.
The discovery by UC Santa Cruz astronomers of pristine clouds of gas formed shortly after the Big Bang is among the scientific breakthroughs of the year featured in year-end issues of Science and Physics World magazines...
Related article: Astronomers find clouds of primordial gas from the early universe. (Nov. 10, 2011)
Related article: Astronomers find clouds of primordial gas from the early universe. (Nov. 10, 2011)
December 19, 2011 — UC Santa Cruz astronomer Jerry Nelson to receive 2012 Franklin Medal
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has announced that Jerry Nelson, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, will receive the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.
Nelson is internationally renowned as a developer of innovative designs for advanced telescopes. The Franklin Institute is honoring him "for his pioneering contributions to the development of segmented-mirror telescopes."...
December 14, 2011 — Closest Type Ia Supernova in Decades Solves a Cosmic Mystery
Before and after images of supernova PTF 11kly as it appeared in the nearby M101 galaxy. (Images: Peter Nugent)
Early close-ups of a Type Ia supernova allow Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues to picture its progenitor and infer how it exploded.
Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia’s) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar “standard candles” astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy – and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” The light from thousands of SN Ia’s has been studied, but until now their physics – how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode – has been educated guesswork.
Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia’s) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar “standard candles” astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy – and 13 years later to a Nobel Prize, “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.” The light from thousands of SN Ia’s has been studied, but until now their physics – how they detonate and what the star systems that produce them actually look like before they explode – has been educated guesswork.
December 14, 2011 — Disaster looms for gas cloud falling into Milky Way's central black hole
The normally quiet neighborhood around the massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is being invaded by a gas cloud that is destined in just a few years to be ripped, shredded and largely eaten.
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Dec. 13, 2011 — Saul Perlmutter receives Nobel Prize in Stockholm
University of California, Berkeley, and Berkeley Lab physicist Saul Perlmutter was feted in Stockholm, Sweden, last week before receiving his Nobel Prize medal on Saturday, Dec. 10, during a ceremony at the Stockholm Concert Hall.
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December 5, 2011 — Record massive black holes discovered lurking in monster galaxies
University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.
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December 02, 2011 — Astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz named to Silicon Valley's '40 Under 40'
Astrophysicist Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz is among 40 "rising stars" in Silicon Valley recognized by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. A special "40 Under 40" feature in the December 2 issue of the Business Journal includes profiles of the honorees, who are recognized for their accomplishments and the impact they have on their communities...
November 09, 2011 — Ancient lunar dynamo may explain magnetized moon rocks
The moon may have had a magnetic field early in its history. Photo by Monica Murphy.
The presence of magnetized rocks on the surface of the moon, which has no global magnetic field, has been a mystery since the days of the Apollo program. Now a team of scientists has proposed a novel mechanism that could have generated a magnetic field on the moon early in its history.
November 3, 2011 — Fermi telescope adds surprising new pulsars to growing collection
Scientists at Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics contributed to new findings.
An international team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a surprisingly powerful millisecond pulsar that challenges existing theories about how these objects form. At the same time, another team has located nine new gamma-ray pulsars in Fermi data, using improved analytical techniques.
November 2, 2011 — Perlmutter, Filippenko in NOVA special
Newly minted Nobel Laureate Saul Perlmutter and astronomer Alex Filippenko are among the scientists interviewed in the premier episode of a four-part NOVA series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which airs tonight on PBS stations around the country. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the one-hour episode can be viewed on KQED-TV at 9 p.m.
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October 27, 2011 — Accepted for Publication in the Astrophysical Journal: Astronomers Pin Down Galaxy Collision Rates by Comparing Space Telescope Photographs to Supercomputer Simulations.
A new analysis of images from the Hubble Space Telescope combined with supercomputer simulations of galaxy collisions has cleared up years of confusion about the rate at which smaller galaxies merge to form bigger ones. This paper, led by Jennifer Lotz of Space Telescope Science Institute, is about to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
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September 29, 2011 — Three "Bolshoi" Supercomputer Simulations of the Evolution of the Universe Announced by Authors from University of California, New Mexico State University
Snapshot from the Bolshoi simulation at a red shift z=0 (meaning at the present time), showing filaments of dark matter along which galaxies are predicted to form.
Two research articles describing the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made—named “Bolshoi” (the Russian word for “great” or “grand”)—have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The results calculated by the Bolshoi simulation and saved for later analysis—spectacular visualizations of what the universe was like at 180 different times from the Big Bang to the present epoch—are being made publicly available to the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists.
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September 29, 2011 — Three "Bolshoi" Supercomputer Simulations of the Evolution of the Universe Announced by Authors from University of California, New Mexico State Universit
Two research articles describing the most accurate cosmological simulation of the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe yet made—named “Bolshoi” (the Russian word for “great” or “grand”)—have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. The results calculated by the Bolshoi simulation—spectacular visualizations of what the universe was like at time steps 40 million or 80 million years apart—are being made publicly available to the world’s astronomers and astrophysicists...
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View the UCSC Press Release
View the NMSU Press Release
View the NASA Ames Press Release
Visit the Bolshoi Simulations Website
September 15, 2011 — Colliding Dwarf Galaxy Triggered Formation of Milky Way's Spiral Arms Revealed by Supercomputer Simulation at University of California, Irvine
Incoming third impact of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy (blue stream of stars) with our Milky Way Galaxy (multicolored disk) was simulated by supercomputer and rendered by Erik J. Tollerud against a background of galaxies seen in the Hubble Deep Field.
A dwarf galaxy that has collided twice with our own Milky Way galaxy, and that is now coming around once again for a third impact, may well have triggered the formation of the Milky Way’s beautiful spiral arms beginning more than two billion years ago. That is the main conclusion of a paper by Chris W. Purcell and four coauthors published today in the internationally renowned British research journal Nature. Purcell’s findings are based on supercomputer simulations conducted for his Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2010 at the University of California, Irvine, a member of the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC).
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September 15, 2011 — Published in September 15, 2011 issue of Nature Magazine: Colliding Dwarf Galaxy Triggered Formation of Milky Way's Spiral Arms Revealed by Supercomputer Simulation at University of California, Irvine
A dwarf galaxy that has collided twice with our own Milky Way galaxy, and that is now coming around once again for a third impact, may well have triggered the formation of the Milky Way’s beautiful spiral arms beginning more than two billion years ago. That is the main conclusion of a paper by Chris W. Purcell and four coauthors published today in the internationally renowned British research journal Nature. Purcell’s findings are based on supercomputer simulations conducted for his Ph.D. dissertation completed in 2010 at the University of California, Irvine, a member of the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC).
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September 8, 2011 — Los Alamos team aids understanding of astrophysical mystery
Three different stellar jets, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
September 8, 2011—New Hubble Space Telescope movies of gas jets from stars reveal their fast-changing inner structures. Thanks to the Los Alamos RAGE computer code and a series of supercomputers, a research team now understands more about how observed shock waves, knots, and filamentary structures in these supersonic glowing jets evolve in the stellar environment.