1. Astronomy

Category Archives: Astronomy

Saturn expert and science popularizer Carolyn Porco joins astronomy department

Posted on by

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE SPACE SCIENCE INSTITUTE, BOULDER, COLORADO

Steve Mullins (720 )974-5859 Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

CASSINI IMAGING LEADER LOOKS TO UC BERKELEY AND CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES FOR MIND-EXPANDING INSPIRATION

March 12, 2015

Carolyn Porco, veteran planetary scientist and leader of the imaging team on NASA's Cassini mission at Saturn, has accepted dual invitations to be a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, and a Distinguished Scholar within the Department of Astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley. The Academy is a world-leading museum, research center, and educational institution with the largest, all-digital, planetarium in the country. UC Berkeley is the flagship University of the UC system.

These appointments will find Porco, for extended periods of time during the coming year, among scholars studying subjects that range from life in the Earth's oceans and environmental science at the Academy, to exoplanets and the development of new ways to search for extraterrestrial intelligence at UC Berkeley.

The proximity to such diverse academic pursuits is especially enticing to Porco, who has spent the last decade focused on Saturn and its rings and moons. In particular, her personal research includes the small icy moon, Enceladus, now known to be home to a subsurface ocean with all the hallmarks of a place hospitable to life. She is hoping that new directions of research and public engagement emerge from her time in the Bay Area.

"I am so looking forward to this opportunity to work alongside my colleagues at Berkeley and the Academy", said Porco. "I'm anticipating a great, mind-expanding rush to come from placing what we have found on Enceladus in the broader context of life within our solar system and beyond, and finding new ways to bring these connections to the public."

Her hosts also find the prospects exciting.

Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist and chair of the Department of Astronomy at UC Berkeley said, "All of us, including students and research staff, are really looking forward to having Carolyn join us and working with her on topics of mutual interest while she is at Berkeley."

Read more here:

Saturn expert and science popularizer Carolyn Porco joins astronomy department

Astronomy – Ch. 7: The Solar Sys – Comparative Planetology (30 of 33) Comets 1 – Video

Posted on by


Astronomy - Ch. 7: The Solar Sys - Comparative Planetology (30 of 33) Comets 1
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will discusses the comets in our Solar System. Next video in this series ...

By: Michel van Biezen

Follow this link:

Astronomy - Ch. 7: The Solar Sys - Comparative Planetology (30 of 33) Comets 1 - Video

Astronomy- The Hubble Space Telescope: Stunning Hubble Video – Video

Posted on by


Astronomy- The Hubble Space Telescope: Stunning Hubble Video
Stunning video featuring an original composition of a number of NASA / ESA videos and images Bringing you the BEST Space and Astronomy videos online. Showcasing videos and images from the...

By: Amazing Space - Astounding Images and Videos

Read more from the original source:

Astronomy- The Hubble Space Telescope: Stunning Hubble Video - Video

Masterclass Introduces Local High School Students to Particle Physics

Posted on by

UC Riversides Department of Physics and Astronomy offers the interactive exercise for the eighth year in a row

By Iqbal Pittalwala on March 11, 2015

The International Particle Physics Masterclass is an interactive exercise in which high school students analyze specific particle physics data. Photo credit: I. Pittalwala, UC Riverside.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. On March 10 and 11, approximately 35 students from San Jacinto High School and Valencia High School visited the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside to participate in the International Particle Physics Masterclass, an annual program of the European Particle Physics Outreach Group. The Masterclass is an interactive exercise in which high school students analyze specific particle physics data.

The visiting students attended a series of special lectures and participated in exercises on March 10. They took part in a videoconference with CERN (the particle physics laboratory on the border of Switzerland and France) and high schools in Brazil, France, Belgium and Hungary on March 11.

A slideshow follows:

Archived under: Inside UCR, CNAS, College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences, Department of Physics and Astronomy, high school students, Masterclass, particle physics

Top of Page

Read the rest here:

Masterclass Introduces Local High School Students to Particle Physics

What Do Gene Sequencing, Radio Astronomy And Particle Physics Have In Common?

Posted on by

Modern scientific discovery is driven by one thing, without which breakthroughs like gene sequencing, the search for the Higgs boson and dark matter and huge telescope arrays wouldnt be possible High Performance Computing (HPC).

With the computational might to blitz through millions of bytes of data, calculations and statistical possibilities, scientists were able to posit the existence of particles like the Higgs boson and campaign for expensive projects like the Large Hadron Collider because they could show what they were looking for.

The same kind of processing power is whats allowing the UKs version of the Genome Project, attempting to sequence whole genomes rather than just excerpts known as exons, to go ahead.

Cambridge University has had HPC in one form or another for 18 years, from the old 80s supercomputer sitting in the middle of a room, to its modern new server facility, which is based on a large Dell Dell server cluster made up of 9.600 cores and four petabytes of storage running on a Hadoop platform and is currently getting its finishing touches after a 20m investment.

Cambridge Universitys new HPC system, used for particle physics, radio astronomy, gene sequencing and other big data, big science projects. (Credit: Cambridge University)

The university has one of the largest research and development budgets in the UK education sector, devoting 40 per cent of its 1438m annual revenue to funding advances in the fields of astronomy, genomics, medicine, physics and many more.

But its HPC time is also hired out to businesses in the nearby science and technology park, helping the university to pay for top IT support, while providing a valuable niche service to firms.

Just a few years ago, that kind of commoditisation of HPC wouldnt have been possible, Dr Paul Calleja, director of HPC Service at Cambridge, told visitors in a talk attended by Forbes.

Visit link:

What Do Gene Sequencing, Radio Astronomy And Particle Physics Have In Common?

Chasing The Mystery Of Spacetime's Local 'Bulk Flow'

Posted on by

For decades, the root cause of our Milky Way galaxys bulk flow in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations has retained an air of mystery. Our own stars motion through the Milky Way is relatively well understood. But a full understanding of the exact forces driving our Local Group of galaxies peculiar velocities at rates of 631 kilometers-per-second remains elusive.

Quite apart from our universes long-documented inflationary expansion (known as the Hubble Expansion), the local cosmos which surrounds us over millions of light years has its own peculiar trajectory and velocity.

What is known is that we are moving in bulk towards the Great Attractor (a region of half a dozen galaxy clusters some 150 million light years away), and the Shapley Concentration (a supercluster of galaxies some three times farther distant).

Hubble Space Telescope view towards the Great Attractor. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Is this just the result of gravity towards more massive and much more distant galaxy superclusters, or

A paper just submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) details cosmological distance measurements from some 8000 objects, most of which were from within our own Laniakea supercluster. As reported last September by Brent Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa and colleagues in the journal Nature, the Milky Way is actually an outlier of this newly-named supercluster whose estimated 100,000 galaxies span some 500 million light years.

Yehuda Hoffmann, an astronomer at Israels Hebrew University, and colleagues used the Cosmicflows-2 catalogue (CF-2), the largest and most accurate ever catalog of galaxy peculiar velocities to reconstruct a large segment of our local cosmos large scale structure.

We [used] the CF-2 database to uncover the distribution of matter out to distances of hundreds of million of light years, Hoffmann, the papers lead author, told Forbes. Our main result is that the bulk velocity estimated from the CF-2 data is fully consistent with the standard model of cosmology. As Tully told Forbes, from our perspective, both downtown Laniakea and the Shapley supercluster lie in the same direction. Its the combination of these two things lined up like a spring tide that is pulling us. but we dont yet have a full accounting for whats causing our motion, said Tully. Until we can actually add up all the vectors and [still] come up with this number of 600 kilometers per second, theres still an incomplete story.

How do researchers actually use such data?

The team used 8000 separate distance measurements for their MNRAS paper; including 300 distances derived from Type 1a supernovae.

Read the original:

Chasing The Mystery Of Spacetime's Local 'Bulk Flow'


  1. Astronomy