Professor Newton's group presented a discovery of a transiting planet larger than Neptune but smaller than Saturn, orbiting one of the brightest young stars known. Aged almost 45 million years of old, the star and its planet could give significant...
[more]Congratulations to Tara Sweeney (’19) and Zion Slaughter (’22) for winning undergraduate awards for blazar research with Professor Jedidah Isler during Summer 2019.
Tara Sweeney won a UGAR Leave Term Grant for 2019X for her project entitled, “A Statistical Analysis of the Optical Polarization in Blazars.” She is building her own analysis pipeline to better understand the long-term variability in optical polarization of blazars and how it relates to source brightness.
Zion...
[more]Stephanie Podjed (2nd year graduate student) won the Sigma Xi Grant-in-Aid of Research Award for her project entitled, “Multi-wavelength High-temporal Cadence Monitoring of Flaring and Quiescent Blazars.“ Only 12-15% of Grant in Aid of Research applicants receive any level of funding and Stephanie received the full level of funding available. She will use her award to travel to MDM Observatory in Arizona and the SALT telescope in Sutherland, South Africa. Stephanie is completing...
[more]Congratulations to Professor Roberto Onofrio for his recent naming to the Institute of Physics' 2018 list of Outstanding Reviewers. Every year, a panel of journalists at the IOP convene and decide on a hand-picked roster of members from the international scientific community to receive this distinction, that they feel have distinguished themselves based on the "quality, quantity, and timeliness of their reviews.” Click here to read more about the...
[more]Graduate student Christina Gilligan was a co-winner in the Guarini
School of Graduate Studies three-minute thesis competition. Without
slides, notes or props, Christina presented a three minute summary of
her thesis research on the oldest stars in our galaxy to a panel of
judges at the Top of the Hop. Christina will represent Dartmouth at the
Ivy League three minute thesis competition, which will occur at the
United Nations in New York City ...
Pictured above is the first ever direct image of a black hole. The subject of the photograph is a supermassive black hole residing in the center of the M87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation, and it took a team of scientists over a decade to visually capture. This team used the technique of Very-Long-Baseline-Interferometry and powerful atomic clocks to virtually "link" eight large radio telescopes from around the world into one effective dish that was able to precisely gather the relevant...
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Like much of the known universe — not to mention all that rests beyond it — Marcelo Gleiser eludes straightforward classification. He is a theoretical physicist, a cosmologist, an Ivy League professor, an ultramarathon runner, an author, a blogger and book reviewer for NPR, a starry-...
[more]Congratulations to Professor Jedidah Isler on her recent video feature on PBS News' Brief but Spectacular — a recurring segment dedicated to exploring the lives and minds of extraordinary people and the causes that drive them. During the clip, which aired along with the daily broadcast on Jan. 4, Prof. Isler discusses her lifelong love of astrophysics (and especially blazars) as well as her experiences as a black women pursuing a career in STEM.
To check out the full broadcast...
[more]Every other winter, the department sends a handful of motivated students to Cape Town, South Africa, where they spend ten weeks conducting independent research, doing youth outreach at local schools, and taking courses in astronomy. This includes one full week at the South African Astronomical Observatory, home to the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere, SALT. Pictured above are the 2019 student participants, enjoying a day off to go sightseeing along the Cape of Good Hope.
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[more]Symmetry Magazine lists 10 seemingly normal words that mean something different in a scientific context.