by Briley Lewis | Oct 13, 2020 | Classics, Current Events
This week we’re celebrating this year’s astronomical awardees for the Nobel Prize in Physics. First up, Prof. Andrea Ghez and the mysteries of the Galactic Center!
by David Wilson | Dec 5, 2016 | Daily Paper Summaries
Today’s paper presents new observations of the central star of the Kepler-11 system, which, despite having a planetary system utterly unlike the Solar system, is nearly identical to the Sun.
by Leonardo dos Santos | Jul 5, 2016 | Daily Paper Summaries
How can we explain hot Jupiters? The answer is not completely clear yet, but we are closing in on it: it seems that binaries may play an important role on the formation of these oddball planets.
by Natasha Batalha | Apr 1, 2015 | Daily Paper Summaries
For years we have observed the compelling fluvial features on the Martian surface. How did they get there? Was there a large ocean? Check out the very first measurements of how much water once flowed on Mars 4.5 billion years ago.
by Lauren Weiss | Aug 29, 2011 | Current Events, Personal Experiences
Last night, I was in the Berkeley-based remote control room of the Keck telescope watching Professor Josh Bloom and his team follow up what Bloom claims to be the “supernova of the generation.” PTF11kly, a type Ia supernova discovered by the Palomar Transient Factory in California, is one of the earliest and closest type Ia supernovae ever observed.How did I stumble into such an important observation? Josh invited the Berkeley first-year graduate students to watch his team remotely observe on the Keck telescope. Even without the prospect of standing witness to scientific history in the making, the five of us were excited to watch the complex operation of Keck, the largest optical telescope in the world. While Josh facilitated observations from a control room in Waimea, Hawaii, the rest of his team controlled the instrument from a duplicate control room at UC Berkeley. From the windowless basement room with an array of plush carpets covering the otherwise sinister black-and-white tiled floor, the other first-year graduate students and I watched history happen. Using the LRIS spectrographon the Keck telescope, Josh’s team obtained one of the earliest spectra of a type Ia supernova ever observed.In yesterday’s post, Kim Phifer describes how the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf generates a type Ia supernova and how we can use type Ia supernova to measure distances. Historically, type Ia supernovae have been used to measure the rate of the expansion of the universe. Precise measurements of the distances and recession velocities of type Ia supernovae resulted in the discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating (not decelerating) rate. The cause of the acceleration is...