Archive:Aileen Serrano

2024 TOP AWARD WINNER – Sanjana Curtis

October 25, 2024

Sanjana Curtis is an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on some of the most extreme phenomena in the universe, such as the explosive deaths of stars and mergers involving neutron stars and black holes. Many of the elements that make up our bodies and our world were forged in these cosmic cataclysms, and Sanjana is working to uncover their origin stories. She loves to share these stories, as well as her passion for research and discovery, through her writing, TikTok videos, and public lectures. She firmly believes that science is for everyone. Read…

UC Berkeley Astronomy Major and Alumni Awarded 2024 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship

October 14, 2024

The MacArthur Foundation announced the Class of 2024 MacArthur Fellows on Tuesday, October 1. MacArthur Fellowships, often called ‘genius grants,’ provide each recipient with an $800,000 stipend, a “no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential,” according to the MacArthur Foundation website. Of the five University of California alums selected this year, two are graduates of UC Berkeley’s College of Letters & Science: Ruha Benjamin and Keivan G. Stassun. Read more

This rocky planet around a white dwarf resembles Earth — 8 billion years from now

September 26, 2024

The discovery of an Earth-like planet 4,000 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy provides a preview of one possible fate for our planet billions of years in the future, when the sun has turned into a white dwarf, and a blasted and frozen Earth has migrated beyond the orbit of Mars. This distant planetary system, identified by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers after observations with the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, looks very similar to expectations for the sun-Earth system: it consists of a white dwarf about half the mass of the sun and an Earth-size companion in…