August 8, 2017 by John Michael Baglione The Center for Astrophysics' new app, Eclipse 2017, comes with several features to prepare, learn, and watch the eclipse that will travel across the United States on Aug. 21. Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Thousands of years ago, human beings reacted to solar eclipses with dismay, flooding the streets with pots and pans to scare away whatever had blotted out the sun with a cacophony of banging and shouting.

When a total solar eclipse crosses the United States on Aug. 21 people will once again take to the streets with a great deal of anxiety, but most will be concerned primarily with getting a good view.

With solar safety glasses available at every counter and an expected 27 million Americans traveling to the path of totalitythe nearly 3,000-mile-long arc from the coast near Salem, Ore., to Charleston, S.C., in which a view of the total eclipse is possibleit is clear that eclipse fever has swept the country. Seeing an opportunity to educate and inspire a new wave of astronomers, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has released a smartphone app, Eclipse 2017, available on iOS and Android.

"We haven't had an eclipse cross the United States like this in nearly 100 years," says CfA spokesperson Tyler Jump. "Because it's such a rare and exciting event, we wanted to create an interactive guide that everyone could enjoy. Even if you're not in the path of totality, our app allows you to calculate exactly how much of an eclipse you'll be able to see and get a preview with our eclipse simulation. It's also a great opportunity to highlight some of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's (SAO) solar research. SAO was founded in large part to study the sun, and we've been doing so now for more than a century."

The free app comes with a host of resources for the amateur astronomer. A comprehensive viewing guide offers a crash course in the science behind eclipses and instructions on how to safely observe the celestial phenomenon. Videos from the Solar Dynamics Observatory show the sun in different wavelengths, revealing the many layers of solar activity. Users can also access an interactive eclipse map, which gives lunar transit times and simulated views for any location in the United States.

In Cambridge, a partial eclipse covering most of the sun will be visible in the afternoon from about 1:30 to 4. But along the path of totality, for up to 2 minutes, viewers will enjoy one of the astronomy's most extraordinary sights: the sun's ethereal corona. Normally invisible due to the amount of light emanating from the sun's surface, the "crown" of magnetized plasma reaches temperatures over a million degrees Kelvinnearly 2 million Fahrenheitand is best known as the site of the sun's awesome and violent flares.

Monday's will be the first total eclipse to be visible from the United States since 1991, and the first to be visible from every state since 1918. Though this is the first total eclipse to cross the United States in nearly 40 years, there is a total eclipse visible from Earth about every 18 months.

For those who will not have a chance to view the eclipse with their own eyes, the app will provide a live stream of the eclipse as it travels across the country. But if it has to be the real thing, in April 2024 the United States is due for total eclipse that will travel from Texas to Maine. A lucky stretch of land along the Illinois, Missouri, and Kentucky borders will see two total eclipses in just seven years.

Explore further: What's a total solar eclipse and why this one is so unusual

This story is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University's official newspaper. For additional university news, visit Harvard.edu.

Total solar eclipses occur every year or two or three, often in the middle of nowhere like the South Pacific or Antarctic. What makes the Aug. 21 eclipse so special is that it will cut diagonally across the entire United ...

This August, the U.S. will experience its first coast-to-coast total solar eclipse in 99 years.

The upcoming solar eclipse in August bids to be more than a rare celestial event - it could meld the increasingly pervasive world of smartphone apps with a total eclipse visible from sea to shining sea.

For the first time in almost a century the United States is preparing for a coast-to-coast solar eclipse, a rare celestial event millions of Americans, with caution, will be able to observe.

For the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse will crossthe entire nation on Monday, August 21, 2017. Over the course of 100 minutes, 14 states across the United States will experience over two minutes of darkness ...

More than 300 million people in the United States potentially could directly view the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse, and NASA wants everyone who will witness this celestial phenomenon to do so safely.

After conducting a cosmic inventory of sorts to calculate and categorize stellar-remnant black holes, astronomers from the University of California, Irvine have concluded that there are probably tens of millions of the enigmatic, ...

Studies of molecular clouds have revealed that star formation usually occurs in a two-step process. First, supersonic flows compress the clouds into dense filaments light-years long, after which gravity collapses the densest ...

A group of astronomers led by Javier Lorenzo of the University of Alicante, Spain, has discovered that the binary star system HD 64315 is more complex than previously thought. The new study reveals that HD 64315 contains ...

The five sunshield layers responsible for protecting the optics and instruments of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope are now fully installed.

In our hunt for Earth-like planets and extraterrestrial life, we've found thousands of exoplanets orbiting stars other than our sun. The caveat is that most of these planets have been detected using indirect methods. Similar ...

A NASA mission designed to explore the stars in search of planets outside of our solar system is a step closer to launch, now that its four cameras have been completed by researchers at MIT.

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Read the original post:

Educational app released ahead of highly anticipated solar eclipse - Phys.Org

August 7, 2017 For the first time, scientists have conducted thermonuclear measurements of nuclear reaction cross-sections under extreme conditions like those of stellar interiors. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Most of the nuclear reactions that drive the nucleosynthesis of the elements in our universe occur in very extreme stellar plasma conditions. This intense environment found in the deep interiors of stars has made it nearly impossible for scientists to perform nuclear measurements in these conditions - until now.

In a unique cross-disciplinary collaboration between the fields of plasma physics, nuclear astrophysics and laser fusion, a team of researchers including scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Ohio University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), describe experiments performed in conditions like those of stellar interiors. The team's findings were published today by Nature Physics.

The experiments are the first thermonuclear measurements of nuclear reaction cross-sections - a quantity that describes the probability that reactants will undergo a fusion reaction - in high-energy-density plasma conditions that are equivalent to the burning cores of giant stars, i.e. 10-40 times more massive than the sun. These extreme plasma conditions boast hydrogen-isotope densities compressed by a factor of a thousand to near that of solid lead and temperatures heated to ~50 million Kelvin. These also are the conditions in stars that lead to supernovae, the most massive explosions in the universe.

"Ordinarily, these kinds of nuclear astrophysics experiments are performed on accelerator experiments in the laboratory, which become particularly challenging at the low energies often relevant for nucleosynthesis," said LLNL physicist Dan Casey, the lead author on the paper. "As the reaction cross-sections fall rapidly with decreasing reactant energy, bound electron screening corrections become significant, and terrestrial and cosmic background sources become a major experimental challenge."

The work was conducted at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF), the only experimental tool in the world capable of creating temperatures and pressures like those found in the cores of stars and giant planets. Using the indirect drive approach, NIF was used to drive a gas-filled capsule implosion, heating capsules to extraordinary temperatures and compressing them to high densities where fusion reactions can occur.

"One of the most important findings is that we reproduced prior measurements made on accelerators in radically different conditions," Casey said. "This really establishes a new tool in the nuclear astrophysics field for studying various processes and reactions that may be difficult to access any other way."

"Perhaps most importantly, this work lays groundwork for potential experimental tests of phenomena that can only be found in the extreme plasma conditions of stellar interiors. One example is of plasma electron screening, a process that is important in nucleosynthesis but has not been observed experimentally," Casey added.

Now that the team has established a technique to perform these measurements, related teams like that led by Maria Gatu Johnson at MIT are looking to explore other nuclear reactions and ways to attempt to measure the impact of plasma electrons on the nuclear reactions.

Explore further: How heavier elements are formed in star interiors

More information: D. T. Casey et al. Thermonuclear reactions probed at stellar-core conditions with laser-based inertial-confinement fusion, Nature Physics (2017). DOI: 10.1038/nphys4220

When the renowned cosmologist Carl Sagan declared that "we are made of starstuff," he wasn't speaking metaphorically. As Sagan said in the TV series "Cosmos," many of the elements in our bodies - "the nitrogen in our DNA, ...

Nuclear astrophysicists successfully created the first low-energy particle accelerator beam deep underground in the United States, bringing them one step closer to understanding how the elements of our universe are built.

Determining the chemical abundance pattern left by the earliest stars in the universe is no easy feat. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist is helping to do just that.

Turbulence, the violently unruly disturbance of plasma, can prevent plasma from growing hot enough to fuel fusion reactions. Long a puzzling concern of researchers has been the impact on turbulence of atoms recycled from ...

The energy production in stars utlimately depends on certain nuclear reactions at energies close to the so-called Gamow-peak that affect strongly the chemical composition of stars and the surrounding planetary systems. These ...

Two major issues confronting magnetic-confinement fusion energy are enabling the walls of devices that house fusion reactions to survive bombardment by energetic particles, and improving confinement of the plasma required ...

Most of the nuclear reactions that drive the nucleosynthesis of the elements in our universe occur in very extreme stellar plasma conditions. This intense environment found in the deep interiors of stars has made it nearly ...

New results show a difference in the way neutrinos and antineutrinos behave, which could help explain why there is so much matter in the universe.

Engineers at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego have developed a camera that generates four-dimensional images and can capture 138 degrees of information. The new camerathe first-ever single-lens, ...

A research team at the University of Central Florida has demonstrated the fastest light pulse ever developed, a 53-attosecond X-ray flash.

Air travel may be the quickest way to get to your vacation destination, but it's also one of the speediest ways for infectious diseases to spread between people, cities and countries.

(Phys.org)Quantum engines are known to operate differently thanand in some cases, outperformtheir classical counterparts. However, previous research on the performance of quantum engines may be overestimating their ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

View original post here:

Scientists probe the conditions of stellar interiors to measure nuclear reactions - Phys.Org

Map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey. The map covers about 1/30th of the entire sky and spans several billion light years in extent. Red regions have more dark matter than average, blue regions less dark matter. Image credit: Chihway Chang of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, and the DES collaboration.

COLUMBUS, OhioExactly 100 years after Einstein confronted the idea of an expanding universe in his general theory of relativity, researchers from The Ohio State University and their colleagues from theDark Energy Survey(DES) collaboration have reached a new milestone mapping the growth of the universe from its infancy to present day.

The new results released last Thursday confirm the surprisingly simple but puzzling theory that the present universe is comprised of only 4% ordinary matter, 26% mysterious dark matter, and the remaining 70% in the form of mysterious dark energy, which causes the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The findings are based on data collected during the DES first year, which covers over 1300 square degrees of the sky or about the area of 6,000 full moons. DES uses the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Blanco 4m telescope at theCerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory high in the Chilean Andes.

We had to construct the most powerful instrument of its kind. It is sensitive enough to collect light from galaxies 8 billion light years away, saidKlaus Honscheid, professor ofphysics and leader of the Ohio State DES group. Key components of the 570 mega-pixel camerawere built at Ohio State.

Paradoxically, it is easier to measure the structure of the universe in the distant past than it is to measure it today. In the first 400,000 years following the Big Bang, the universe was filled with a glowing gas, the light from which survives to this day. Thiscosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation gives us a snapshot of the universe at that very early time. Since then, the gravity of dark matter has pulled mass together and made the universe clumpier over time. But dark energy has been fighting back, pushing matter apart. Using the CMB as a start, cosmologists can calculate precisely how this battle plays out over 14 billion years.

With the new results, we are able for the first time to see the current structure of the universe with a similar level of clarity as we can see its infancy. Dark energy is needed to explain how the infant Universe evolved to what we observe now. said Niall MacCrann, postdoctoral fellow at Ohio StatesCenter for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP) and major contributor to the analysis.

DES scientists used two methods to measure dark matter. First, they created maps of galaxy positions as tracers, and second, they precisely measured the shapes of 26 million galaxies to directly map the patterns of dark matter over billions of light years, using a technique called gravitational lensing. Ashley Ross of CCAPP and leader of the DES large scale structure working group said: For the first time we were able to perform these studies with data from the same experiment allowing us to obtain the most accurate results to date.

To make these ultra-precise measurements, the DES team developed new ways to detect the tiny lensing distortions of galaxy images, an effect not even visible to the eye, enabling revolutionary advances in understanding these cosmic signals. In the process, they created the largest guide to spotting dark matter in the cosmos ever drawn (see image). The new dark matter map is ten times the size of the one DES released in 2015 and will eventually be three times larger than it is now.

A large scientific team achieved these results working in seven countries across three continents. Successful collaboration at this scale represents many years of deep commitment, collective vision and sustained effort, said Ami Choi, CCAPP postdoctoral fellow who worked on the galaxy shape measurements.

Michael Troxel, CCAPP postdoctoral fellow and leader of the weak gravitational lensing analysis added: These results are based on unprecedented statistical power and detailed understanding of the telescope and potential biases in the analysis. Crucially, we performed a 'blind' analysis, in which we finalized all aspects of the analysis before we knew the results, thereby avoiding confirmation biases.

The DES measurements of the present universe agree with the results obtained by the Planck satellite that studied the cosmic microwave background radiation from a time when the universe was just 400,000 years old.The moment we realized that our measurement matched the Planck result within 7% was thrilling for the entire collaboration, said Honscheid, and this is just the beginning for DES with more data already observed. With one more observing season to go we expect to ultimately use five times more data to learn more about the enigmatic dark sector of the Universe.

The new results from the Dark Energy Survey will be presented by Kavli fellow Elisabeth Krause at the TeV Particle Astrophysics Conference in Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 9, and by CCAPPs Troxel at the International Symposium on Lepton Photon Interactions at High Energies in Guanzhou, China, on Aug. 10.

The publications can be accessed on the Dark Energy Survey website.

Ohio State University is an institutional member of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration. Funding for this research coms in part from the Ohio States Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. The Ohio Supercomputer Center provided a portion of the computing power for this project.

The Ohio State DES team includes Honscheid; Paul Martini and David Weinberg, both professors of astronomy; Choi, Ross, MacCrann and Troxel, all postdoctoral fellows at CCAPP; and doctoral students Su-Jeong Lee and Hui Kong.

Link:

Researchers unveil most accurate map of the invisible universe - The Ohio State University News (press release)

Dr Cynthia Chiang has been addicted to tinkering and exploring for as long as she can remember.

And, said the physicist and cosmologist now based at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, she felt fortunate to have found a career that allowed her to continue doing those things every day.

Chiang is a senior lecturer at the universitys Astrophysics and Cosmology Research Unit (ACRU) where she focuses on, among other areas, observational cosmology and using precision measurements to constrain the history, evolution, and structure of the universe.

She and astrophysics PhD students, Liju Philip, Ridhima Nunhokee and Heiko Heilgendorff recently returned from a research trip to Marion Island, located in the sub-Antarctic Indian Ocean in South Africa, where they conducted work on the Probing Radio Intensity at high-Z from Marion (PRIZM) telescope.

PRIZM is a low-frequency radio telescope which collects information about the universe during the cosmic dawn, which is the period a few hundred million years after the big bang when the first stars in the universe formed.

The light from these first stars is too dim for optical telescopes to see, therefore they have never been measured directly.

The project was designed to make this measurement and data received from this telescope could help in determining when the first stars and galaxies formed.

Chiang specialises in instrumentation and data analysis for a variety of cosmic microwave background experiments.

In 2014, she spent two months in the Antarctic where she participated in Spider, a project studying the earliest moments of the universes creation.

The university said in a press release at the time that six telescopes were launched into the stratosphere with a giant helium-filled balloon, which swelled to roughly the size of Durbans Kings Park stadium at its 35km cruising altitude.

From this lofty height, it observed the faint leftover heat from the Big Bang. This afterglow, known as the cosmic microwave background, contains valuable clues that will help unravel the mysteries of our universes explosive beginnings.

Chiang told The Mercury this week: I consider myself to be a physicist and cosmologist rather than an astronomer, strictly speaking. Isidor Isaac Rabi is quoted as saying: I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up and they keep their curiosity.

For me, wanting to learn about the natural world has always been in my blood.

Chiang was born and raised in Illinois in the USA, and did her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

(The institution) has a strong engineering department, and I feel very lucky that I had a chance to see so many people building amazing machines. Seeing that kind of inspiring hands-on work really cemented my career direction in instrumentation development.

But, it wasnt until graduate school that she turned specifically to astrophysics.

I attended the California Institute of Technology for my PhD, and it was by pure chance that a classmate suggested that I check out the astro guy and his labs in the basement.

That astro guy, she said, was Andrew Lange, who ultimately became her PhD advisor.

I will never forget stepping foot into the observational cosmology labs for the first time. The instrumentation was incredible, and it was the kind of work I had always wanted. I was instantly hooked, and there was no turning back.

Chiang credits her parents for much of her success.

I come from an academic family: my mother is an astronomer, and my father is a physicist. My mother can solve anything and has the sharpest wit of anyone I know, and my father is MacGyver and can build anything from nothing.

Chiang said that, while she had never been the target of any kind of overt sexism, she was aware that other women were often at the receiving end of such attacks.

One of my students once asked me if anyone had ever said to me that I cant study mathematics or physics because Im female. She had apparently received this comment more than once in the past. I was absolutely livid to hear this. I tend to be outspoken, so I told her that the next time this happens, she should respond by saying: Just because you think mathematics or physics is hard doesnt mean that everyone else does too.

What is her advice for aspirant cosmologists and physicists?

My advice is gender-neutral: always try to run with the best, play to your strengths, be assertive in finding new opportunities to learn, and keep your curiosity alive.

The Mercury

Read more:

UKZN lecturer probes cosmic past - Independent Online

SOUTH BEND Linda Marks has always had a fascination with the sky.

It began as she was growing up on the east coast. Her mother was a small airplane pilot in a time before airplanes had complex navigational systems. Pilots used the position of celestial objects constellations, planets and individual stars to navigate from origin to destination.

"I looked up in the sky a lot," said Marks, of North Liberty. "My mom would take me out and show me different things in the sky. When I was old enough, I joined Girl Scouts and they had a star badge. As you can guess, I dived right into that."

Marks will draw upon her life-long interest in gazing skyward in two weeks as she and millions of others across the nation look to the heavens to catch a glimpse of one of the rarest natural phenomenon a total solar eclipse.

It happens Aug. 21 when the moon's shadow will travel around 10,000 miles across the Earth's surface, from the middle of the Pacific Ocean across the continental United States to the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa.

Weather-permitting, all of North America will have a view of a partial eclipse, when the moon blocks a portion of the sun. In South Bend, the moon is expected to block approximately 86 percent of the sun with the maximum eclipse coming at 2:22 p.m., according to NASA.

Marks, vice president of the Michiana Astronomical Society, said she and a number of other club members will be traveling, to be under the path of totality, the area that will experience the total eclipse.

"We're spread out," she said. "We're pretty much everywhere."

It's a calculated strategy. The group doesn't want everyone bunched together in case their chosen location has less than ideal weather conditions.

Unlike a lunar eclipse, in which the earth casts a shadow across the surface of the moon that is visible to a wide swath along on Earth, a total solar eclipse is very focused.

"You have to be in exactly the right spot," said Peter Garnavich, professor and department chair of Astrophysics and Cosmology Physics at the University of Notre Dame. "It leads to a bit of excitement."

The relative rarity of a total solar eclipse also helps build excitement. There hasn't been one in the United States since Feb. 26, 1979.

This year's event is being billed as the Great American Eclipse because it will occur exclusively in the United States. When it last happened, Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States.

Starting off the coast of Oregon at 9:05 a.m. PDT, the moon's inner shadow, known as the umbra, will cast a 70-mile-wide shadow that will turn day into night across 14 states before exiting off the coast of South Carolina at 4:09 p.m. EDT.

While everyone in Indiana will be able to view a partial eclipse this go-around, there is no spot in the state that will be in the path of the total solar eclipse. For eclipse enthusiasts, there will be an opportunity a little closer to home. On April 8, 2024, the center line of a total solar eclipse will pass just south of Indianapolis. Another total solar eclipse, on Sept. 14, 2099, will place all of the South Bend region in the path of totality.

Garnavich's interest in astronomy and physics began as a boy. He witnessed a partial solar eclipse in the 1970s and received a telescope when he was in the fifth grade.

"The eclipse is what pushed me over the edge and I decided this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," he said.

Eclipses used to provide the greatest opportunity for scientists to study the sun and learn more about it and its impacts on the Earth.

"The scientific yield is not as great as it used to be," Garnavich said. "Nowadays, there are really specialized satellites where we can continually monitor the sun and take measurements."

Jerry Hinnefeld, a professor of physics at Indiana University South Bend, said the appeal of solar eclipses now is the ability to garner interest in science and mathematics.

"It is very exciting. It's an opportunity to generate interest and enthusiasm in astronomy," Hinnefeld said. "It piques people's curiosity and gets people thinking about things they may not ordinarily think about."

Students will just be returning to the IU South Bend campus for the first day of classes when the eclipse happens, Hinnefeld said. There will be a number of activities on campus as part of welcome week festivities tied into the eclipse, including eclipse viewing from the green mall.

Though Notre Dame students don't start classes until the day after the eclipse, there will be activities there as well. Garnavich said the university will have viewers set up outside the Jordan Hall of Science for people to safely view the eclipse. The university's Digital Visualization Theater will host a simulation of the eclipse on Aug. 9 and Aug. 12.

One area organization has a unique connection that is paying dividends for the upcoming eclipse.

The Elkhart Public Library is one of 75 public libraries nationwide to partner with NASA as part of the NASA@ My Library program, a partnership between NASA, the libraries, the Ameircan Library Association and the Space Science Institute. The program offers materials and training to help the libraries lead fun, educational science, technology, engineering and mathematics-based programming.

"We were thrilled to be chosen for this program," said Allison McLean, head of young people's services at the library and the project director for the NASA grant. "The timing couldn't have been better. The eclipse will be our first big event with the program."

McLean said the library has already held one eclipse-related event for adults back in July. On Monday at 4:30 p.m., the library will host an Eclipse 101 program for kids ages 5 and up. The library is also hosting a viewing party on Aug. 21 at Central Park in downtown Elkhart, complete with eclipse glasses.

"We can see the excitement building everywhere," McLean said. "We've definitely seen an uptick in people looking for eclipse-related materials."

While most people will have to be content to view the eclipse from the ground, or view images from organizations like NASA, Dave Bohlmann, an engineer who teaches part-time at Ivy Tech Community College's South Bend campus, will have another perspective.

Bohlmann has spent the last several years sending balloons to the very edge of space. He's had four practice runs preparing for a launch the day of the eclipse from Perryville, Mo., inside the path of totality. Bohlmann's mission is simple, he's sending the balloons up to a height of 100,000 feet or more where the curvature of the earth is visible in an effort to capture images and video of the moon's shadow as it traverses the earth.

"Right now, we're just doing some final preparations," Bohlmann said. "We're almost ready."

Bohlmann's group is one of several planning to do launches from the Perryville area. In addition to amateur high altitude balloon enthusiasts like Bohlmann, there are also more than 50 NASA-funded balloons and numerous ground-based observations planned to gather a host of images and data.

After four test flights, Bohlmann knows his balloons take about two hours to get up to altitude. He's planning to launch about an hour and 40 minutes before totality in Perryville in order to make sure his balloon is in position.

"It's going to be exciting," Bohlmann said.

See the original post:

Area prepares for the Great American Eclipse - South Bend Tribune

August 4, 2017 Artists depiction of a neutron star. Credit: NASA

Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis.

As the late Carl Sagan once put it: "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff."

But what about the heavier elements in the periodic chart, elements such as gold, platinum and uranium?

Astronomers believe most of these "r-process elements"elements much heavier than ironwere created, either in the aftermath of the collapse of massive stars and the associated supernova explosions, or in the merging of binary neutron star systems.

"A different kind of furnace was needed to forge gold, platinum, uranium and most other elements heavier than iron," explained George Fuller, a theoretical astrophysicist and professor of physics who directs UC San Diego's Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. "These elements most likely formed in an environment rich with neutrons."

In a paper published August 7 in the journal Physical Review Letters, he and two other theoretical astrophysicists at UCLAAlex Kusenko and Volodymyr Takhistovoffer another means by which stars could have produced these heavy elements: tiny black holes that came into contact with and are captured by neutron stars, and then destroy them.

Neutron stars are the smallest and densest stars known to exist, so dense that a spoonful of their surface has an equivalent mass of three billion tons.

Tiny black holes are more speculative, but many astronomers believe they could be a byproduct of the Big Bang and that they could now make up some fraction of the "dark matter"the unseen, nearly non-interacting stuff that observations reveal exists in the universe.

If these tiny black holes follow the distribution of dark matter in space and co-exist with neutron stars, Fuller and his colleagues contend in their paper that some interesting physics would occur.

They calculate that, in rare instances, a neutron star will capture such a black hole and then devoured from the inside out by it. This violent process can lead to the ejection of some of the dense neutron star matter into space.

"Small black holes produced in the Big Bang can invade a neutron star and eat it from the inside," Fuller explained. "In the last milliseconds of the neutron star's demise, the amount of ejected neutron-rich material is sufficient to explain the observed abundances of heavy elements."

"As the neutron stars are devoured," he added, "they spin up and eject cold neutron matter, which decompresses, heats up and make these elements."

This process of creating the periodic table's heaviest elements would also provide explanations for a number of other unresolved puzzles in the universe and within our own Milky Way galaxy.

"Since these events happen rarely, one can understand why only one in ten dwarf galaxies is enriched with heavy elements," said Fuller. "The systematic destruction of neutron stars by primordial black holes is consistent with the paucity of neutron stars in the galactic center and in dwarf galaxies, where the density of black holes should be very high."

In addition, the scientists calculated that ejection of nuclear matter from the tiny black holes devouring neutron stars would produce three other unexplained phenomenon observed by astronomers.

"They are a distinctive display of infrared light (sometimes termed a "kilonova"), a radio emission that may explain the mysterious Fast Radio Bursts from unknown sources deep in the cosmos, and the positrons detected in the galactic center by X-ray observations," said Fuller. "Each of these represent long-standing mysteries. It is indeed surprising that the solutions of these seemingly unrelated phenomena may be connected with the violent end of neutron stars at the hands of tiny black holes."

Explore further: New simulations could help in hunt for massive mergers of neutron stars, black holes

More information: Primordial black holes and r-process nucleosynthesis, Physical Review Letters (2017). journals.aps.org/prl/accepted/ 5a1a918b69bd6d2e6077

Now that scientists can detect the wiggly distortions in space-time created by the merger of massive black holes, they are setting their sights on the dynamics and aftermath of other cosmic duos that unify in catastrophic ...

The lightest few elements in the periodic table formed minutes after the Big Bang. Heavier chemical elements are created by stars, either from nuclear fusion in their interiors or in catastrophic explosions. However, scientists ...

A globular cluster is a roughly spherical ensemble of stars (as many as several million) that are gravitationally bound together, and typically located in the outer regions of galaxies. Low mass X-ray binary stars (LMXBs) ...

NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, is an X-ray telescope launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early June 2017. Installed on the International Space Station, by mid-July it will commence its scientific ...

A group of astronomers have shown that the fastest-moving stars in our galaxy - which are travelling so fast that they can escape the Milky Way - are in fact runaways from a much smaller galaxy in orbit around our own.

Professor Sudip Bhattacharyya of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, India, and Professor Deepto Chakrabarty (MIT), an adjunct visiting professor at the same institute, have shown that a population ...

(Phys.org)Quantum engines are known to operate differently thanand in some cases, outperformtheir classical counterparts. However, previous research on the performance of quantum engines may be overestimating their ...

Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis.

Researchers at North Carolina State University and Duke University have developed a way to assemble and pre-program tiny structures made from microscopic cubes - "microbot origami" - to change their shape when actuated by ...

Imperial researchers have tested a 'blued' gauntlet from a 16th-century suit of armour with a method usually used to study solar panels.

In general, solid state physicists are not able to separate the two processes, so they cannot answer the question, whether the magnetic order is indeed reduced, or whether it is just hidden.

Astrophysicists have a fairly accurate understanding of how the universe ages: That's the conclusion of new results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a large international science collaboration, including researchers from ...

Adjust slider to filter visible comments by rank

Display comments: newest first

how/massive/are/the/black/holes/they/modelled?

On topic of article, it is most plausible that elements (especially the heavier variety) transmute from neutron matter. It is widely known that a neutron in free space decays into a hydrogen atom. I conjecture that inside of stars it is not the proton proton chain reaction that leads to helium production but rather quad neutron convergence that results in helium. I'd venture so far as to say that just as in free space neutrons decay into a proton and electron, the inverse occurs under the immense pressures in the cores of stars. Hydrogen converts to neutrons.

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Go here to see the original:

Primordial black holes may have helped to forge heavy elements - Phys.Org

August 5, 2017 TESS spacecraft awaits installation of cameras and other instruments. Credit: Orbital ATK

A NASA mission designed to explore the stars in search of planets outside of our solar system is a step closer to launch, now that its four cameras have been completed by researchers at MIT.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), due to launch in 2018, will travel through space, identifying more than 20,000 extrasolar planets. These will range from Earth-sized planets to much larger gas giants. TESS is expected to catalog a sample of around 500 Earth-sized and "super Earth" planets, or those with radii less than twice that of Earth. It will detect small rock-and-ice planets orbiting a diverse range of stars, including rocky worlds in the habitable zones of their host stars.

"The scientific community is eagerly awaiting the launch of TESS and the first data release in 2018," says Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences at MIT and deputy lead of the TESS Science Office.

During its two-year mission, TESS, which is being led by MIT and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, will monitor the brightness of more than 200,000 stars. It will search for temporary drops in brightness caused by an exoplanet passing in front of its host star, as viewed from Earth.

The satellite's four cameras, developed by researchers at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, are equipped with large-aperture wide-angle lenses designed to survey the entire sky.

The video will load shortly

Each camera consists of a lens assembly containing seven optical elements and a detector with four charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor chips. The overall process of designing, fabricating, and testing the cameras at MIT has taken four years to complete.

The cameras were recently delivered to Dulles, Virginia-based aerospace company Orbital ATK, where they will be integrated onto the satellite. The four cameras have been mounted onto the camera plate, and successful operation with the flight computer has been demonstrated.

The instruments have just been inspected by NASA and a group of independent technical experts, as part of a formal Systems Integration Review of all TESS components, which they passed successfully.

Each of the four cameras has a field of view that is more than five times greater than that of the camera flown on the earlier planet-hunting Kepler space observatory mission, according to TESS Principal Investigator George Ricker, senior research scientist at the MIT Kavli Institute.

"The TESS four-camera ensemble instantaneously views a section of sky that is more than 20 times greater than that for the Kepler mission," Ricker says. "The instantaneous field of view of the TESS cameras, combined with their area and detector sensitivity, is unprecedented in a space mission."

A complication found in very fast wide-angle lenses, such as those in the TESS cameras, is that the image sharpness varies over the field of view, and there is no single focus, as found in more conventional cameras. Furthermore, the imaging properties change as the temperature of the cameras changes.

The MIT TESS team has subjected the cameras to extended, rigorous testing in conditions designed to replicate the environment they will be subjected to in space. These tests demonstrate that the cameras perform as expected, but with a small shift in focus relative to that predicted by models. This shift results in simulated stellar images in the center of the field appearing sharper than expected, while images at the edges of the field are somewhat less sharp. However, after independently studying the effects of this shift, researchers on the MIT TESS team and at NASA both concluded that the mission will readily achieve all of its scientific goals.

TESS relies on its ability to sense minute changes in stellar brightness to detect planets passing across them. The data processing is designed to correct for the variations in image sharpness over the field for most of the stars, and it will produce a record of brightness over time for every star being monitored, according to Jacqueline Hewitt, director of the MIT Kavli Institute.

The MIT TESS team will continue to carry out long-term ground tests on a spare flight camera to ensure that their in-orbit performance is well understood.

Following its launch next year, TESS will divide the sky into 26 "stitched" sections and will point its cameras at each of these in turn for 27 days. It will explore the Southern Hemisphere in the first year of its mission, and the Northern Hemisphere in its second year.

"TESS is classed by NASA as an Explorer mission with very focused scientific goals," Hewitt says. "It was designed to find exoplanets that are nearby and orbiting bright stars, so we can study them in great detail."

The data produced by the cameras will first be processed by the spacecraft's on-board computer. They will then be transmitted to Earth every two weeks via the NASA Deep Space Network and immediately forwarded to the TESS Payload Operations Center at MIT.

Explore further: TESS mission cleared for next development phase

Provided by: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NASA has officially confirmed the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, clearing it to move forward into the development phase. This marks a significant step for the TESS mission, which would search the entire ...

NASA's search for planets outside of our solar system has mostly involved very distant, faint stars. NASA's upcoming Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), by contrast, will look at the brightest stars in our solar ...

As the search for life on distant planets heats up, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is bringing this hunt closer to home. Launching in 2017-2018, TESS will identify planets orbiting the brightest stars ...

NASA's Astrophysics Explorer Program has selected the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission to fly in 2017. TESS will follow in the footsteps of NASA's pioneering Kepler Mission, continuing the groundbreaking ...

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), planned to be launched in August 2017 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, is designed to discover thousands of exoplanets. Led ...

Set to launch in 2017, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will monitor more than half a million stars over its two-year mission, with a focus on the smallest, brightest stellar objects.

A NASA mission designed to explore the stars in search of planets outside of our solar system is a step closer to launch, now that its four cameras have been completed by researchers at MIT.

On July 5, 2017, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory watched an active regionan area of intense and complex magnetic fieldsrotate into view on the Sun. The satellite continued to track the region as it grew and eventually ...

Spectacular sunsets and sunrises are enough to dazzle most of us, but to astronomers, dusk and dawn are a waste of good observing time. They want a truly dark sky.

The elemental composition of the Sun's hot atmosphere known as the 'corona' is strongly linked to the 11-year solar magnetic activity cycle, a team of scientists from UCL, George Mason University and Naval Research Laboratory ...

According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System's formation was triggered by a shock wave from an exploding supernova. The shock wave injected material from the exploding star into a neighboring cloud of dust and gas, ...

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was part of an international team that recently discovered a relatively unpopulated region of the main asteroid belt, where the few asteroids present are likely pristine relics from early ...

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

See the original post:

TESS mission to discover new planets moves toward launch - Phys.Org

Sponsored Post

Few problems are more computationally intense than magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations for astrophysics. Even with the best algorithms and hardware, some calculations can take weeks to complete.

Simulations mathematical modeling is used to discover the evolutionary processes that created and continue to shape the universe. Clearly, performing experiments in the laboratory here on Earth are just not possible. But simulating these complex cosmic processes at high resolution is possible and requires the most powerful supercomputers.

At Novosibirsk State University (NSU), a major research and education center in Siberia, astrophysicists needed to optimize performance of the AstroPhi project codes they were developing for Intel Xeon PhiTM processor-based hardware. This valuable project helps students learn to create numerical simulation codes for massively parallel supercomputers.

A key aspect of the AstroPhi project was optimizing the code for maximum performance on the Intel Xeon Phi processors. Before optimization, the team had difficulty identifying vector dependencies and choosing the best vector sizes. The goals for optimizing the code were to remove vector dependencies that inhibited optimization and to optimize memory load operations by efficiently adapting vector and array sizes for the Intel Xeon Phi architecture. To help achieve these goals, the team turned to Intel Advisor and Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector, tools that are part of Intel Parallel Studio XE.

The NSU team co-designed a new solver for massively parallel architectures based on Intel Xeon Phi processors. They based the solver on Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel AVX-512) instructions. These instructions deliver 512-bit SIMD support and enable programs to pack eight double-precision or 16 single-precision floating-point numbers, or eight 64-bit integers, or 16 32-bit integers within the 512-bit vectors. This enables processing twice the number of data elements that AVX/AVX2 can process with a single instruction, and 4X that of SSE.

On todays processors, it is crucial to both vectorize (using AVX* or SIMD* instructions) and parallelize software to realize the full performance potential of the processor. Using Intel Advisor, part of Intel Parallel Studio XE, the team was able to perform a roofline analysis to highlight poor-performing loops and show performance headroom for each loop, identifying which can be improved and which are worth improving.

The team reported that Intel Advisor made it easier to identify bottlenecks and determine the best optimization strategies by forecasting performance gains in various scenarios, greatly eliminating wasted implementation time. Intel Advisor provided the project team tips for effective vectorization along with key data like trip counts, data dependencies, and memory access patterns, to make vectorization safe and efficient.

Also, using the graphical Intel Trace Analyzer and Collector increased the teams understanding of the applications MPI communication behavior across nodes. Here too they were quickly able to find bottlenecks, improve correctness, and maximize the applications performance on Intel architecture. MPI communications profiling and analysis features helped to improve application scaling.

By optimizing their applications with tools from Intel Parallel Studio XE, and running on the latest Intel hardware, the NSU team achieved a performance speed-up of 3X, cutting the standard time for calculating one problem from one week to just two days.

Intel Parallel Studio XE is a comprehensive software development suite of compilers and tools that gives developers the ability to maximize application performance on todays and future processors by taking advantage of the ever-increasing processor core count and vector register width.

Download your free 30-day trial of Intel Parallel Studio XE

Read this article:

3X Performance Boost Using Intel Advisor and Intel Trace Analyzer in Astrophysics Simulations - insideHPC

Penn: Office of University Communications

Penn Astronomers Contribute to the Most Accurate Measurement of Dark Matter Structure in the Universe Penn: Office of University Communications ... of the universe is accelerating, which wouldn't happen in a 'normal' universe, said Gary Bernstein, Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and Project Scientist ... Survey Provides High-Precision Measurements of Universe's MakeupLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Our clumpy cosmos | symmetry magazineSymmetry magazine Dark Energy Survey: Most Accurate Map of Recent Universe Unveiled by ScientistsNewsweek The Daily Galaxy (blog) -Engadget -Tech Times all 35 news articles »

See the rest here:

Penn Astronomers Contribute to the Most Accurate Measurement of Dark Matter Structure in the Universe - Penn: Office of University Communications

Christian D. Ott, a tenured professor of theoretical astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology, has resigned in the wake of an investigation that found he had harassed two students.

From BuzzFeed:

"This has been a difficult situation for our community," the Caltech statement said. Caltech declined to provide any further comment to BuzzFeed News, and Ott did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to more than 1,000 pages of emails and chat messages submitted to the investigators, first publicly reported by BuzzFeed News, Ott had become infatuated with Kleiser, whom he then fired due to his feelings. He later confessed his actions in increasingly inappropriate and erratic emotional exchanges with Gossan.

Gossan filed a complaint with the university's Title IX office in the spring of 2015, which Kleiser joined soon after. Prior to Gossan's complaint, Kleiser had no idea she had been fired for reasons unrelated to her scientific work.

Kleiser is relieved that Ott resigned. But her experience with him, as well as the "lukewarm" response from many in the faculty to news of the problem, has led her to decide to leave academia once her PhD is complete.

"I didnt see a lot of action on the part of people that I considered to be my role models in my field," Kleiser said. "So thats kind of difficult, and I think that makes it harder to want to stay and eventually take a permanent position in a place like this."

In 112 recent cases of stalking and harassment reviewed by UK police watchdogs, not a single one was dealt with properly, reports the BBC. The report, Living in Fear, found that victims of harassment and stalking were widely disregard and left at risk, and often told that the harassment they received was their own fault. []

In the New York Times, Katie Bienner relates a cultural shift in Silicon Valley: women victims of sexual harassment describing their experiences frankly. In an industry bound by delusions of meritocracy and egality, simply talking about it is radical. More than two dozen women in the technology start-up industry spoke to The Times in recent []

A Connecticut man who screamed You will never ever, ever, stop me, my Christianity, thumped his chest, and menaced an Arab family on a Texas beach, was charged with public intoxication earlier this week, reports Fox News. This man verbally attacked an Arab family and yelled Donald Trump will stop you pic.twitter.com/m8vrV3RS3S NowThis (@nowthisnews) May []

Web technology has matured considerably in the last decade, and developers are continually in demand. If youre looking to add some skills to your resume, or are just interested in exploring the possibilities of the web, check out this Interactive Web Developer Bootcamp.In this course, youll get a comprehensive overview of full-stack development using modern []

Even if you only use your PC for web browsing, media playback, or light document creation, default software can sometimes come up short. To give your Windows PC a bit of a boost, weve compiled a variety of helpful, paid apps that can enhance your user experience and make you more productive.In thePremium PC Power []

Many people find it easiest to learn things by doing them. If youre looking to give a doer in your life an interesting, hands-on project, check out these tech-focused DIY kits:DIY AT-AT Cable Organizer & Card Case ($32.99)With this kit, you get to put together a wooden replica of an AT-AT that keeps cables, pens, []

See the rest here:

Caltech astrophysics professor who harassed women has resigned - Boing Boing

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered about the stars, planets and galaxies but have no time to read up on it? Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson can help with that.

What exactly is astrophysics? Its the branch of astronomy concerned with the physical nature of stars and other celestial bodies. The book offers small chapters of easily consumable information about our universe.

Tyson is a well-known astrophysicist, author and general science communicator. I was excited when I saw he had a new book out. I have had a busy summer, but his book is especially designed for people with a full schedule, making it a quick, fun read.

He begins with the Big Bang and the formation of the universe. Tyson moves on to some intriguing facts about the universe while also briefly explaining the history of physics itself. Some topics he touches on are the cosmic background, what it is and why its so important to studying the universe.

He writes about how exciting and weird the space between galaxies can be, containing million-degree X-ray emitting gas, dark matter, faint blue galaxies ... super-duper high-energy charged particles and the mysterious quantum vacuum energy.

The author also includes chapters on dark matter and dark energy, and why they are so interesting. And he explains why the planet Uranus has moons named after characters in Shakespearean plays.

Tyson does an excellent job of taking broad, often confusing topics and making them easily understandable and engaging. His writing, while witty and delightful, is likewise beautiful and thought-provoking.

Heres an example. When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets and planets, each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity, sometimes I forget that too many people act in wanton disregard for the delicate interplay of Earths atmosphere, oceans and land, with consequences that our children and our childrens children will witness and pay for with their health and well-being.

I really enjoyed this book, picking it up whenever I had a spare moment, transporting me to the wonders and mysteries of our universe. I would highly recommend this as a gift for teens and adults interested in space or science. I believe it is also a wonderful place to begin if youre just starting to ponder the universe yourself.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson was published in May by W.W. Norton & Co. It retails for $18.95.

Rachel Fowler works for Inklings Bookshop. She and other Inklings staffers review books in this space every week.

See the original post:

Book Scene: Pondering the universe ... quickly - Yakima Herald-Republic

This artists impression of SN 2017egm shows the power source for this extraordinarily bright supernova. The explosion was triggered by a massive star that collapsed to form a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field and rapid spin, called a magnetar. Debris from the supernova explosion is shown in blue and the magnetar is shown in red. Credit: M. Weiss/CfA

Many rock stars dont like to play by the rules, and a cosmic one is no exception. A team of astronomers has discovered that an extraordinarily bright supernova occurred in a surprising location. This heavy metal supernova discovery challenges current ideas of how and where such super-charged supernovas occur.

Supernovas are some of the most energetic events in the Universe. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it can collapse onto itself and create a spectacular explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy, dispersing vital elements into space.

In the past decade, astronomers have discovered about fifty supernovas, out of the thousands known, that are particularly powerful. These explosions are up to 100 times brighter than other supernovas caused by the collapse of a massive star.

Following the recent discovery of one of these superluminous supernovas, a team of astronomers led by Matt Nicholl from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., has uncovered vital clues about where some of these extraordinary objects come from.

Cambridge Universitys Gaia Science Alerts team discovered this supernova, dubbed SN 2017egm, on May 23, 2017 with the European Space Agencys Gaia satellite. A team led by Subo Dong of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University used the Nordic Optical Telescope to identify it as a superluminous supernova.

SN 2017egm is located in a spiral galaxy about 420 million light years from Earth, making it about three times closer than any other superluminous supernova previously seen. Dong realized that the galaxy was very surprising, as virtually all known superluminous supernovas have been found in dwarf galaxies that are much smaller than spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.

Building on this discovery, the CfA team found that SN 2017egms host galaxy has a high concentration of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which astronomers call metals. This is the first clear evidence for a metal-rich birthplace for a superluminous supernova. The dwarf galaxies that usually host superluminous supernovas are known to have a low metal content, which was thought to be an essential ingredient for making these explosions.

Superluminous supernovas were already the rock stars of the supernova world, said Nicholl. We now know that some of them like heavy metal, so to speak, and explode in galaxies like our own Milky Way.

If one of these went off in our own Galaxy, it would be much brighter than any supernova in recorded human history and would be as bright as the full Moon, said co-author Edo Berger, also of the CfA. However, theyre so rare that we probably have to wait several million years to see one.

The CfA researchers also found more clues about the nature of SN 2017egm. In particular, their new study supports the idea that a rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron star, called a magnetar, is likely the engine that drives the incredible amount of light generated by these supernovas.

While the brightness of SN 2017egm and the properties of the magnetar that powers it overlap with those of other superluminous supernovas, the amount of mass ejected by SN 2017egm may be lower than the average event. This difference may indicate that the massive star that led to SN 2017egm lost more mass than most superluminous supernova progenitors before exploding. The spin rate of the magnetar may also be slower than average.

These results show that the amount of metals has at most only a small effect on the properties of a superluminous supernova and the engine driving it. However, the metal-rich variety occurs at only about 10% of the rate of the metal-poor ones. Similar results have been found for bursts of gamma rays associated with the explosion of massive stars. This suggests a close association between these two types of objects.

From July 4th, 2017 until September 16th, 2017 the supernova is not observable because it is too close to the Sun. After that, detailed studies should be possible for at least a few more years.

This should break all records for how long a superluminous supernova can be followed, said co-author Raffaella Margutti of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Im excited to see what other surprises this object has in store for us.

The CfA team observed SN 2017egm on June 18th with the 60-inch telescope at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatorys Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

A paper by Matt Nicholl describing these results was recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available online. In addition to Berger and Margutti, the co-authors of the paper are Peter Blanchard, James Guillochon, and Joel Leja, all of the CfA, and Ryan Chornock of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

A copy of the paper isavailable online.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) is a joint collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

Continue reading here:

Astronomers discover 'heavy metal' supernova rocking out - Astronomy Now Online

Kozhikode: Applications have been invited from highly motivated students for the award of research scholarship to do a Ph.D. at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, an Autonomous Institution of the University Grants Commission or at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA-TIFR), Pune, a centre of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Pune Campus.

The selection for the research scholarship will be through IUCAA-NCRA Admission Test (INAT) 2017, a written test at IUCAA, on December 7, 2017 (Thursday) and two interviews on December 7 and/ or 8, 2017 (Thursday and Friday), at NCRA-TIFR, Pune.

Eligibility: Students in any branch of B.E., B.Tech., M.E. or M.Tech degrees, or in the Physics, Electronics, Astronomy or Applied Mathematics branches of the B.Sc. or M.Sc. degrees, are eligible to apply for INAT-2017.

Those expecting to complete their M.Sc./Integrated M.Sc./M.E./M.Tech degrees by July 2018 with a minimum of 55% marks will be eligible for selection to the Ph.D. programme of both IUCAA and NCRA-TIFR. Those who complete their B.E./B.Tech degrees by July 2018 are eligible for selection to the Ph.D. programme at IUCAA and to the Integrated Ph.D. programme at NCRA-TIFR.

Students who complete their B.Sc. degrees by July 2018 will be eligible for selection to the Integrated Ph.D. programme at NCRA-TIFR and for pre-selection to the Ph.D. programme at IUCAA. In addition, talented final-year B.Sc., 1st year M.Sc., 3rd/4th year Integrated M.Sc. and 2nd/3rd year B.E./B.Tech students may also apply to be pre-selected for the Ph.D. programme at IUCAA.

Those who have already completed any of the above degrees are also eligible.

Applicants should have consistently good academic record. Students from engineering backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply for INAT-2017. Applicant should be interested in carrying out doctoral research in Physics or Astronomy and Astrophysics and should have a good understanding of basic Physics.

Written Test: The Written Test will be of 2 hours duration. The question paper will have two parts, A and B with Part A containing 20 objective-type questions on basic Mathematics, Physics and Electronics. Part B will also have 20 objective-type questions from advanced Physics, Mathematics and Electronics/Engineering. For each question, candidates will have to identify and mark the correct answer from the given four answers. Each correct answer will carry 3 marks while for each wrong answer, one mark will be deducted.

Interview: Based on the performance in the written test, a limited number of candidates will be invited for two interviews, which will be conducted on December 7 and/or 8, 2017 by two different committees.

Final Selection: The final selection will be based on the scores in the written test and interviews.

Candidates selected by either IUCAA or NCRA-TIFR are expected to join in August 2018 (except for pre-selected candidates), after satisfactory completion of their qualifying examination.For both IUCAA and NCRA-TIFR, the selection through INAT is in addition to the selection through the Joint Entrance Screening Test (JEST).

Application: Applications can be submitted at the Apply Online link, at http://inat.ncra.tifr.res.in/INAT2017/. Applicant must first register by entering name and valid e-mail address in the appropriate registration boxes at http://inat.ncra.tifr.res.in/INAT2017/candidate/ApplyOnline.ncra.

An application password will then be automatically sent to the candidate's e-mail address; the e-mail address and the password must be entered in order to fill out the Online Application Form. The Application Form also requires the names and e-mail addresses of two referees.

Online Application Form has to be submitted by September 15, 2017. When the form is submitted, the candidate will receive an e-mail containing his/her Online ID, an account password, and confirmation that s/he has applied for INAT-2017. E-mails will also be automatically sent to the two referees, requesting them to fill and submit the online Confidential Assessment Form. The candidates should inform their referees about the Assessment Form. The last date for the online submission of the Assessment forms is September 20, 2017.

Each applicant must submit his/her Application Form before the referee fills the Assessment Form. Applicants may send e-mail to the Co-ordinator at inat@ncra.tifr.res.in in case of any problems with the online forms.

Based on the applications and referee assessments, applicants will be short-listed and invited to take the written test, to be held in Pune on December 7, 2017 (Thursday). All candidates who are invited to take the IUCAA-NCRA Admission Test should bring the Admit Letter with them. For the written test, the candidates should bring a pen, a pencil (HB), an eraser, and a simple mathematical calculator.

Those with more than 55% in the qualifying examination may walk-in for the written test by producing valid photo identification and bringing a copy of his/her most recent mark sheet. They should report at the Chandrasekhar Auditorium, IUCAA by 9 a.m for verification of these documents, to ensure that there are no logistical problems.

Based on the marks in the written test candidates will be shortlisted and invited to attend two interviews, by two different committees. Candidates have to bring all original mark sheets (starting from Class X) and any other relevant certificates when attending the interviews.

All outstation candidates who are invited to take the test will be paid travel support as per the prevailing rules. Outstation candidates will be paid one and one-third times the train/bus fare by second-class sleeper from their place of residence, as given in the INAT-2017 Application Form, to Pune and back by the shortest route, as well as a halting allowance, as per the prevailing rules, for each day of stay for the interviews. In the case of walk-in candidates, travel support will be paid as per rules only to those candidates who qualify for the interviews.

The final selection will be based on a combination of the marks obtained in the written test and the interviews.

Limited accommodation, restricted to candidates who will appear for the written Admission Test, may be available on the IUCAA and NCRA-TIFR campuses at a nominal charge. Those who wish to avail of this accommodation should send an e-mail request to the Coordinator, INAT-2017; at the e-mail address inat@ncra.tifr.res.in, before November 15, 2017.

Candidates should apply online at http://inat.ncra.tifr.res.in/inat. More details, including eligibility for selection to the different programmes at IUCAA and NCRA-TIFR as well as information for walk-in candidates, are available at the same URL.

Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) (An Autonomous Institution of the University Grants Commission) Post Bag 4, Ganeshkhind, S. P. Pune University Campus, Pune 411 007, India. Tel: +91 20 2560 4100 | Fax: +91 20 2560 4699 Website: http://www.iucaa.in.

National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Post Bag 3, Ganeshkhind, S. P. Pune University Campus, Pune 411 007, India. Tel: +91 20 2571 9000 | Fax: +91 20 2569 2149;Website: http://www.ncra.tifr.res.in ;http://inat.ncra.tifr.res.in/INAT2017/candidate/welcome.ncra

Read more from the original source:

Research at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics - Mathrubhumi English

Of all the mysteries in astrophysics, supernova explosions may seem to be the best-understood, at least to a lay person. A star runs out of fuel and goes boom.

But most of what we know is based on guesswork. My recent article on supernovas, Lucky Break Leads to Controversial Supernova Discovery, focused on the puzzles surrounding just one class of these objects so-called Type II core-collapse supernovas. But another common kind of supernova has recently been subject to scrutiny, and uncertainties over this type of supernova could affect our understanding of larger cosmic questions.

Until a few years ago, astronomers believed that all Type Ia supernovas are like fireworks built on the same assembly line, each one bursting with an identical brightness. Because of this, Type Ia supernovas were used as standard candles calibrated beacons that astronomers could use to deduce cosmic distances. Cosmologists used these supernovas to show that the universe is filled with mysterious stuff called dark energy a discovery that garnered the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

More recently, however, scientists have realized that the standard-candle model is flawed. Researchers have known since the 1990s that not all Type Ia supernovas reach the same brightness. Brighter ones appear to dim a little more slowly than fainter ones, so astrophysicists have been able to correct for the difference. But now researchers believe there is a strong relationship between the metallicity of a supernova (how many elements it contains that are heavier than helium) and its brightness. And metallicity is not easy to measure.

And while we know that a Type Ia supernova is a thermonuclear explosion that generates huge amounts of heavy elements such as iron, we still dont understand exactly what triggers it, although so-called white dwarf stars play a starring role. These objects are the cold, inert remnants of mid-mass stars such as our sun. A white dwarf star is exceptionally stable and would never explode on its own. But sometimes it will pull matter away from a nearby object, accreting mass until it hits a very precise milestone called the Chandrasekhar limit. At that point, the white dwarf can no longer support its own weight, and an explosion ensues. White dwarfs at the Chandrasekhar limit are thought to be more or less identical, which is why Type Ia supernovas were considered to be such great standard candles.

But what, astronomers wonder, is the nearby object that white dwarfs are pulling matter from? There is no consensus among astronomers what the progenitor system is for TypeIasupernovas, said Subo Dong, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University. According to Mark Sullivan, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton, the companion star could be another white dwarf, or it could be something else, perhaps a main-sequence star a few times more massive than our sun. If its another white dwarf, the two might spiral inward and merge, which could significantly affect what happens. Studying the explosion mechanism and progenitor systems of Type Ia supernovas is a very active area of research nowadays, Dong said. I think we are at an exciting time of a paradigm shift in understanding thesupernovaexplosion.

Supernovas can explode in many varied and diverse ways that we are only just beginning to understand, Sullivan said. Even events that we thought we understood very well such as Type Ia supernovas turn out to have a surprising amount of variation.

Go here to see the original:

Cookie-Cutter Supernovas Might Come in Different Flavors - Quanta Magazine

As a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Bob Lindner used to develop artificial intelligence to better understand the stars, programming ways to analyze the data collected by massive telescopes.

Now, his startup VEDA Data applies those same mechanics to something smaller in scale: the directories of doctors found on health insurance websites.

VEDA Data uses machine learning in which computers are programmed to learn behaviors on their own to improve the accuracy of health care provider directories. According to Lindner, computers are great at parsing not just complex astronomical data, but complex health care data.

The same way of thinking is being applied, Lindner said. These data amounts are so huge.

Improving provider network accuracy has proven a mounting issue. According to a report released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services earlier this year, 45 percent of entries in the directories provided by insurers contracted with Medicare are inaccurate. There are incorrect addresses, wrong phone numbers, and even incorrect information about whether a doctor is actually within the network the group of providers that an insurer has decided to include in their plans.

Listing accurate information in whats essentially a provider phone book seems like it shouldnt be that hard. But its a problem that insurance companies have been struggling to solve, said the company's co-founder and CEO Meghan Gaffney Buck.

There are some really stupid billion-dollar problems, and this is one of them, she said.

Inaccurate directories are also a barrier to health care in the U.S. As a New York Times report from last year found, patients have accidentally sought care with out-of-network providers due to inaccurate directories, finding themselves slammed with unexpected bills.

Buck said the flawed directories can also result in people not getting care at all, especially those with lower incomes or who are older.

"You call, and (the directory) says they're accepting new patients and they're in network, and lo and behold they're not," she said. You might call three providers, and then give up. You just say, I'm not feeling well, but I give up.

Sometimes glitches or the sheer volume of data to trick can be an issue. Buck also suggested that health care providers have an incentive to provide confusing information a health system may list a physician as operating from multiple offices so as to more easily process claims, for example.

"There is actually profit motivation for health systems to list every doctor at every location in their system, she said.

In 2015, the Obama Administration enacted new rules and penalties for insurers offering inaccurate directories. VEDA Data markets to insurers looking to dodge fines and improve their listings.

The system that Lindner has constructed pulls data about providers from disparate sources ranging from the self-reported lists doctors give insurers to the publicly available National Provider Identifier database. Even Yelp reviews are included. The system picks out chunks of information a phone number, whether a provider is in the network, whether they're taking new patients and determines whether its accurate or not.

Humans grade the computer program on how its doing by fact-checking small portions of its work. The program then takes that feedback, learns from it, and becomes better at determining what's accurate.

The startup has forged a partnership with Humana. Lindner said that they're not quite at 100 percent accuracy, but have been able to improve the databases there to accuracy ranges of over 70 percent.

Its a complex task. But as Buck tells potential clients, its not exactly astrophysics.

"There's a lot more data in the galaxy than in this health record, so we're good," she said.

As for Lindner, he's happy with the change from astrophysics to health care. He was always more interested in the big data methodologies than the field itself.

"While the universe never ends in fascinating me ... sometimes I felt disconnected fromsociety on the Earth," he said. "It is refreshing and compelling to tackle problems that can affect the lives of millions of people for the better."

Continue reading here:

Madison researcher goes from astrophysics to health care with new startup - Madison.com

July 27, 2017 An all-sky image of the Milky Way, as observed by the Planck Space Observatory in infrared. The data contained in this image were used in this research and were essential in calculating the distribution of the light energy of our galaxy. Credit: ESA / HFI / LFI consortia.

For the first time, a team of scientists have calculated the distribution of all light energy contained within the Milky Way, which will provide new insight into the make-up of our galaxy and how stars in spiral galaxies such as ours form. The study is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This research, conducted by astrophysicists at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), in collaboration with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany and from the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy, also shows how the stellar photons, or stellar light, within the Milky Way control the production of the highest energy photons in the Universe, the gamma-rays. This was made possible using a novel method involving computer calculations that track the destiny of all photons in the galaxy, including the photons that are emitted by interstellar dust, as heat radiation.

Previous attempts to derive the distribution of all light in the Milky Way based on star counts have failed to account for the all-sky images of the Milky Way, including recent images provided by the European Space Agency's Planck Space Observatory, which map out heat radiation or infrared light.

Lead author Prof Cristina Popescu from the University of Central Lancashire, said: "We have not only determined the distribution of light energy in the Milky Way, but also made predictions for the stellar and interstellar dust content of the Milky Way."

By tracking all stellar photons and making predictions for how the Milky Way should appear in ultraviolet, visual and heat radiation, scientists have been able to calculate a complete picture of how stellar light is distributed throughout our Galaxy. An understanding of these processes is a crucial step towards gaining a complete picture of our Galaxy and its history.

The modelling of the distribution of light in the Milky Way follows on from previous research that Prof Popescu and Dr Richard Tuffs from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics conducted on modelling the stellar light from other galaxies, where the observer has an outside view.

Commenting on the research, Dr Tuffs, one of the co-authors of the paper, said: "It has to be noted that looking at galaxies from outside is a much easier task than looking from inside, as in the case of our Galaxy."

Scientists have also been able to show how the stellar light within our Galaxy affects the production of gamma-ray photons through interactions with cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are high-energy electrons and protons that control star and planet formation and the processes governing galactic evolution. They promote chemical reactions in interstellar space, leading to the formation of complex and ultimately life-critical molecules.

Dr Tuffs added: "Working backwards through the chain of interactions and propagations, one can work out the original source of the cosmic rays."

The research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, was strongly interdisciplinary, bringing together optical and infrared astrophysics and astro-particle physics. Prof Popescu notes: "We had developed some of our computational programs before this research started, in the context of modelling spiral galaxies, and we need to thank the UK's Science and Technology Facility Council (STFC) for their support in the development of these codes. This research would also not have been possible without the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which is greatly acknowledged."

Explore further: Complex gas motion in the center of the Milky Way

More information: C. C. Popescu et al, A radiation transfer model for the Milky Way: I. Radiation fields and application to high-energy astrophysics, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2017). DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stx1282

How does the gas in the centre of the Milky Way behave? Researchers from Heidelberg University, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oxford, recently investigated the motion of gas clouds in a comprehensive ...

A team of astronomers from the University of Manchester, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and the University of Bonn have uncovered a hidden stellar birthplace in a nearby spiral galaxy, using a telescope in Chile. ...

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found a signal at the center of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy that could indicate the presence of the mysterious stuff known as dark matter. The gamma-ray signal is similar to ...

VISTA's infrared capabilities have now allowed astronomers to see the myriad of stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy much more clearly than ever before. The result is this record-breaking imagethe biggest infrared ...

Astronomers have developed a way to detect the ultraviolet (UV) background of the Universe, which could help explain why there are so few small galaxies in the cosmos.

A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team led by Prof Noriyuki Matsunaga of the University of Tokyo. The Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers find ...

A three-man space crew from Italy, Russia and the United States on Friday arrived at the International Space Station for a five-month mission Friday.

August 21st will bring a history-making opportunity for the entire United States. On that day, every person in the country, including Hawaii and Alaska, will have an opportunity to witness at least a partial solar eclipse ...

Carnegie's Benjamin Shappee is part of a team of scientists, including an Australian amateur astronomer, which discovered a new comet last week.

NASA scientists have definitively detected the chemical acrylonitrile in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, a place that has long intrigued scientists investigating the chemical precursors of life.

(Phys.org)A team led by David Kipping of Columbia University has spotted what might be the first evidence of an exomoon. They have written a paper describing their findings and have uploaded it to the arXiv preprint server.

A Soyuz space capsule successfully blasted off for the International Space Station on Friday, carrying an American astronaut, a Russian cosmonaut and an Italian astronaut.

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

See the rest here:

Astrophysicists map out the light energy contained within the Milky ... - Phys.Org

Krishna Rajagopal, the William A.M. Burden professor of physics and former chair of the MIT faculty, has been named dean for digital learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the institute said in a July 26 news release.

Rajagopal will assume the post Sept. 1.

I am excited about this new challenge, as I will be helping MIT faculty members take their passions for teaching and learning to new levels in ways that can have long-lasting impact across MIT and around the world, the Indian American educator said in a statement.

Our digital learning efforts already reach thousands of students in MIT classrooms and millions of learners around the world. What makes this an exciting time for education is that as these technologies, as well as research on how people learn, evolve, they are transforming how we teach today, and will do so in ways that we cannot yet see and must invent, he said.

In his role, Rajagopal will lead efforts to empower MIT faculty to use digital technologies to augment and transform how they teach, MIT said.

He is charged with building and strengthening connections between academic departments and the Office of Vice President for Open Learning, to facilitate broad-based engagement and bottom-up change, it added.

Rajagopal will work with vice president for open learning Sanjay Sarma and senior associate dean of digital learning Isaac Chuang on the offices strategy and organization.

Krishna combines his stellar research career with a passion for improving teaching and learning and a remarkable ability to integrate diverse points of views into a unifying vision, Sarma, who made the Rajagopal announcement, said in a statement. In a time of significant changes in education, I am confident that Krishna will offer great guidance for our open learning initiatives. He will work to maintain and enhance MITs position as a leader in providing access to high-quality education around the world, and he will continue to improve teaching at MIT.

Previously, Rajagopal served as associate head for education in the department of physics, where he stewarded the department's undergraduate and graduate educational programs and became known for his dedication to students, the news release said.

Since joining the MIT faculty in 1997, Rajagopal has produced a significant body of research in theoretical physics focused largely on how quarks behave in extraordinary conditions such as the hot quark soup that filled the microseconds-old universe, conditions that provide a test bed for understanding how a complex world emerges from simple underlying laws, MIT said.

His work links nuclear and particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and string theory, it added.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004. He is a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and won the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011 and the Buechner Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1999, according to his bio.

Rajagopal grew up in suburban Toronto after his family moved there from Munich when he was less than 1 year old.

He graduated from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and then earned a doctorate degree at Princeton University. After stints as a junior fellow at Harvard University and a Fairchild Fellow at Caltech he joined the MIT faculty in 1997.

Original post:

Physics Professor Krishna Rajagopal Named Dean of Digital ... - India West

Like the solar storms and space radioactivity he has tirelessly chased in his research, the 49-year-old physics lecturer at MUs Faculty of Science has been a local and international force to be reckoned with in the fields of global radiation and cosmic ray research and development.

Ruffolo created new theories of turbulent transport of cosmic rays and developed a widely recognised computer software model to predict the effects on Earth of a solar storm.

He also led the establishment of a neutron monitor in Thailand to detect galactic cosmic rays at the worlds highest geomagnetic cut-off energy (about 17 GV). Out of the worlds 40 neutron monitor stations, the Princess Sirindhorn Neutron Monitor near the summit of Doi Inthanon (Thailands highest mountain) in Chiang Mai province was the worlds first to measure real-time cosmic rays.

Ruffolo was granted Thai nationality in 2012. He received an honour as the Thailand Research Fund (TRF)s Senior Research Scholar in 2016.

A former gifted child, who surpassed age peers to graduate with a PhD at the age of 22 in 1991 at University of Chicago, Ruffolo has come to love Thailand. He first worked here as a high school physics instructor before moving on to university teaching.

After I obtained the PhD, I wanted to do something for Thai society; there were few astrophysicists in Thailand at that time, he recalls. I wanted to be partake in grooming Thai students to become future astrophysicists and space physics scientists. There are more scientists now but there should be even more of them and Thai people should have a thorough understanding of the solar winds, he said.

Although solar storms have not yet killed anyone or torn down any buildings, they could cause blackouts and destroy satellites and spacecraft used for communications. Cosmic rays from solar wind turbulence could also affect human health as people travel by plane or in space. Ruffolo said he would continue studying cosmic rays in relations to the Earth climate to help build a global disaster warning system. And he will pursue other new research that would benefit Thailand and the world.

Scientist is an honourable job that is essential to a countrys development, so I want Thai youths to be interested in studying physics more. I want them to see it as a freedom in learning. Studying science is fun and challenging as you have to find answers for new questions, he said.

Usually children are interested in space but it is difficult to link that interest to physics, which people perceive as a matter of formulas and calculation. Actually space physics is an art, so if we can let children see that physics is fun, while space learning is about applying imagination to something that kids are keen about, he said.

I want parents to let their children feel free to do what they like, are good at and want to do not just follow societys value that academically excellent students must become doctors and engineers. If any kid likes science and wants to become a scientist, the parents should support him or her, he added.

The winner of Thailands annual outstanding scientist award receives a trophy from HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn along with a Bt400,000 cash prize.

The new generation scientist awards 2017, which came with a trophy from the princess and Bt100,000 each, were granted to:

Assistant Professor Burapat Inceesungvorn from the Department of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University; Assistant Professor Benjapon Chalermsinsuwan from the Department of Chemical Technology, Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University; Assistant Professor Varodom Charoensawan from the Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Science, Mahidol University; and Assistant Professor Viboon Tangwarodomnukun from the Department of Production Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, King Mongkuts University of Technology Thonburi.

Continue reading here:

Physics lecturer makes case for children to pursue science - The Nation

EVANSTON - In a first-of-its-kind analysis, Northwestern University astrophysicists have discovered that, contrary to previously standard lore, up to half of the matter in our Milky Way galaxy may come from distant galaxies. As a result, each one of us may be made in part from extragalactic matter.

Using supercomputer simulations, the research team found a major and unexpected new mode for how galaxies, including our own Milky Way, acquired their matter: intergalactic transfer. The simulations show that supernova explosions eject copious amounts of gas from galaxies, which causes atoms to be transported from one galaxy to another via powerful galactic winds. Intergalactic transfer is a newly identified phenomenon, which simulations indicate will be critical for understanding how galaxies evolve.

Given how much of the matter out of which we formed may have come from other galaxies, we could consider ourselves space travelers or extragalactic immigrants, said Daniel Angls-Alczar, a postdoctoral fellow in Northwesterns astrophysics center, CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics), who led the study. It is likely that much of the Milky Ways matter was in other galaxies before it was kicked out by a powerful wind, traveled across intergalactic space and eventually found its new home in the Milky Way.

Galaxies are far apart from each other, so even though galactic winds propagate at several hundred kilometers per second, this process occurred over several billion years.

Professor Claude-Andr Faucher-Gigure and his research group, along with collaborators from the FIRE (Feedback In Realistic Environments) project, which he co-leads, had developed sophisticated numerical simulations that produced realistic 3-D models of galaxies, following a galaxys formation from just after the Big Bang to the present day. Angls-Alczar then developed state-of-the-art algorithms to mine this wealth of data and quantify how galaxies acquire matter from the universe.

The study, which required the equivalent of several million hours of continuous computing, was published today (July 27 in the U.K.) by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

This study transforms our understanding of how galaxies formed from the Big Bang, said Faucher-Gigure, a co-author of the study and assistant professor of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

What this new mode implies is that up to one-half of the atoms around us including in the solar system, on Earth and in each one of us comes not from our own galaxy but from other galaxies, up to one million light years away, he said.

By tracking in detail the complex flows of matter in the simulations, the research team found that gas flows from smaller galaxies to larger galaxies, such as the Milky Way, where the gas forms stars. This transfer of mass through galactic winds can account for up to 50 percent of matter in the larger galaxies.

In our simulations, we were able to trace the origins of stars in Milky Way-like galaxies and determine if the star formed from matter endemic to the galaxy itself or if it formed instead from gas previously contained in another galaxy, said Angls-Alczar, the studys corresponding author.

In a galaxy, stars are bound together: a large collection of stars orbiting a common center of mass. After the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, the universe was filled with a uniform gas no stars, no galaxies. But there were tiny perturbations in the gas, and these started to grow by force of gravity, eventually forming stars and galaxies. After galaxies formed, each had its own identity.

Our origins are much less local than we previously thought, said Faucher-Gigure, a CIERA member. This study gives us a sense of how things around us are connected to distant objects in the sky.

The findings open a new line of research in understanding galaxy formation, the researchers say, and the prediction of intergalactic transfer can now be tested. The Northwestern team plans to collaborate with observational astronomers who are working with the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories to test the simulation predictions.

The research was supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Northwesterns CIERA. The simulations were run and analyzed using NSFs Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing facilities, as well as Northwesterns Quest high-performance computer cluster.

The study is titled The Cosmic Baryon Cycle and Galaxy Mass Assembly in the FIRE Simulations. In addition to Angls-Alczar and Faucher-Gigure, other authors include Duan Kere (University of California, San Diego), Philip F. Hopkins (Caltech), Eliot Quataert (University of California, Berkeley) and Norman Murray (Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics).

More information on the research can be found at Northwesterns galaxy formation group website and on the FIRE project website.

More:

Milky Way's origins are not what they seem - Northwestern University NewsCenter

A Montana State University gravitational physicist has received funding for a research project that aims to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

NASA awarded $750,000 to Nicolas Yunes for his project "Exploring Extreme Gravity: Neutron Stars, Black Holes and Gravitational Waves." Yunes is a founding member of the MSU eXtreme Gravity Institute, known as XGI, and an associate professor in the Department of Physics in MSU's College of Letters and Science. The award, which covers a three-year period, came from NASA's Established Program to Simulate Competitive Research, or EPSCoR.

Yunes' project is one of 22 selected to receive EPSCoR grants for research and technology development in areas critical to NASA's mission and one of 13 to receive the top award of $750,000, according to the agency.

"This is very exciting," Yunes said. "This grant will allow us to explore fundamental questions about gravity and our universe."

Yunes said the award will also allow him to grow his research group within the eXtreme Gravity Institute.

"The institute has really become a hub for this kind of education and research in the Mountain West," Yunes said. "As a result, we're attracting many great students, researchers and faculty to study here in Montana, and this NASA funding is indispensable to our growth and mission."

The project will focus on improving and developing tools to extract as much astrophysics information as possible from X-ray data obtained with NASA'S Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, known as NICER, a payload installed in June aboard the International Space Station that will provide high-precision measurements of neutron stars. Neutron stars are objects that contain ultra-dense matter at the threshold of collapse into black holes, according to NASA.

Researchers in Yunes' group will work to create a framework to test Einstein's Theory of General Relativity using X-ray data from NICER, as well as gravitational wave data gathered by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, a gravitational wave observatory in space.

"This will allow for consistency checks of Einstein's theory and the search for modified gravity anomalies with neutron stars and black holes," Yunes said.

The researchers will also learn more about nuclear physics and general relativity by combining NICER X-ray data with information about gamma rays gained from NASA telescopes, as well as gravitational wave data gleaned from gravitational wave detectors, such as the advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or advanced LIGO.

Yunes said his project is directly related to NASA's strategic mission to better understand the universe through observation and its mission of discovery and knowledge.

"The region of the universe where gravity is unbearably strong and dynamically changing - the extreme gravity universe - is one of the last unturned stones," he said. "This is in part because extreme gravity objects, like neutron stars and black holes, are difficult to resolve due to their size and distance from Earth.

"NASA's investments in neutron star astrophysics and in space-borne gravitational wave astrophysics are aimed at resolving such objects and, for the first time, exploring the extreme gravity universe in detail. We want to aid in this endeavor by developing the tools and the understanding needed to extract the most information from the data."

MSU's eXtreme Gravity Institute was created to further the understanding of astrophysics and fundamental physics through extreme gravity phenomena, including black holes and neutron stars. XGI researchers have contributed to the first detection of gravitational waves, have published research about a new era of discovery in gravitational physics and have won prestigious awards, including a Breakthrough Prize, the General Relativity and Gravitation Young Scientist Prize, and a L'Oreal USA For Women in Science fellowship, among other honors.

Project co-investigators include XGI astrophysicist Bennett Link and gravitational physicist Neil Cornish, both professors in MSU's Department of Physics, as well as Holly Truitt, director of University of Montana's Broader Impacts Group.

In addition to Yunes' research team, another MSU research team has received EPSCoR funding for 2017.

Brock LaMeres, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in MSU's College of Engineering, has received $100,000 for his ongoing project to develop a radiation-tolerant computer technology for use in outer space. The funding will be used to launch a satellite containing the computer prototype from the International Space Station.

That NASA selected to fund the proposals shows that MSU researchers are pursuing novel work that benefits the agency, said Angela Des Jardins, director of Montana NASA EPSCoR and the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

"NASA EPSCoR opportunities bring our capabilities to NASA's attention," Des Jardins said. "As a result, not only are we providing NASA with strategic expertise in key missions but we are also creating valuable research infrastructure here at home."

With the rise of Ad Blockers, and Facebook - our traditional revenue sources via quality network advertising continues to decline. And unlike so many other news sites, we don't have a paywall - with those annoying usernames and passwords.

Our news coverage takes time and effort to publish 365 days a year.

If you find our news sites informative and useful then please consider becoming a regular supporter or for now make a one off contribution.

Read more from the original source:

MSU gravitational physicist receives NASA award to explore extreme gravity and the universe - Space Daily