| · COLUMBIA ASTRO NEWS | |
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Press releases, unusually important publications,
prizes/fellowships, and other internal news are
announced here.
If you have something newsworthy to report, please email Zoltan
Haiman (zoltan @ astro.columbia.edu)
- 10/2/07: NASA has green-lighted the launch of telescopes capable of detecting black holes in the universe with 1,000 times the sensitivity of previous missions. The Small Explorer initiative, housed in Columbia University's Department of Physics, is known as Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and is co-led by Columbia Professor of Physics Charles Hailey, and Prof. Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology. See the official press release from Columbia or from NASA. - 9/1/07: Zoltan Haiman and Szabolcs Marka are co-founders and co-directors of the new Eotvos International Research School in Astrophysics (EIRSA), started in Budapest, Hungary in Fall 2007. - 1/12/07: Columbia University became a partner this week in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is a proposed ground-based 8.4-meter, 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide nightly digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky. In 15 second exposures, LSST will cover the available sky every three nights, opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move on rapid timescales: exploding supernovae, potentially hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and distant Kuiper Belt Objects. The superb images from the LSST will also be used to trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy. LSST is being planned by a partnership of several universities and corporate partners, including google. Learn more at the official website. - 10/12/06: The first-ever detection of a day and a night side, with different temperatures, of a planet outside our solar system was made by an international team of scientists, including Kristen Menou of Columbia University. The team used infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope to reveal that a Jupiter-like gas giant planet circling very close to its sun is hotter on its day side than on its night side. See the official press release or the full article in Science. - 09/05/06: With today's start of the academic year, we welcome our new PhD students, Duane Lee, Kyle Parfrey, Kathryn Stononik, Takamitsu Tanaka; our new research associate, Dylan Semler; our new Science Fellow, Dr. Matthew Collinge; and our new postdocs, Marcel Agueros, Nestor Mirabel, Sanjib Sharma, Bjorn Emonts, Jeno Sokoloski, Yoichi Aso, and Hjalmar Bruhns. Welcome! We also wish well to our graduating students, Aeree Chung (now a Jansky Fellow at Umass, Amherst), Andrei Mesinger (now a postdoc at Yale University), Ryan Young (now a postdoc at Princeton University), Jun Zhang (now a postdoc at UC Berkeley), to research associate Josh Younger (now a PhD student at Harvard), and to Sudhi Tyagi. Congratulations on your achievements here! - 08/25/06: A team led by Department of Physics faculty member Elena Aprile reported a measurement of the absolute ionization yield of nuclear recoils in liquid xenon, as a function of energy and electric field. Their results are the first unambiguous demonstration of the capability of xenon detectors to discriminate between electron and nuclear recoils down to 20 keV, a key requirement for a sensitive dark matter search. The results were published in Physical Review Letters. - 08/24/06: Radio pulses were discovered from a supermagnetic neutron star. The discovery was made by a group led by research scientist Fernando Camilo, and was the first--ever, surprising detection of radio pulses from a magnetar. See the official press release or the full article in Nature. | |