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Where do new stars form in galaxies?
May 24, 2019
Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way are studded with cold clouds of hydrogen gas and dust, like chocolate chips in a loaded Toll House cookie. Astronomers have long focused on these so-called molecular clouds, suspecting that they are hotspots for star formation. But are they?
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Uros Seljak is one of Eight Berkeley faculty elected to National Academy of Sciences
April 30, 2019
In recognition of their outstanding achievements in original research, eight UC Berkeley faculty have been elected members of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most distinguished scientific organizations in the country. The newly elected researchers include a neuroscientist, two physicists, two cellular biologists, a computer scientist, a chemist and an economist, and bring the total number of living UC Berkeley faculty who are members of the academy to 135.
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Astronomy Names Recipients for 2018-2019 Outstanding GSI Awards
April 22, 2019
The Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor (OGSI) Award honors UC Berkeley GSIs each year for their outstanding work in the teaching of undergraduates. These OGSI recipients are nominated from within their teaching department. Criteria includes the following: overall effectiveness as an instructor capacity to promote critical thinking skills in presenting course material utilization of pedagogically effective approaches, for example, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, or community-based learning skills in developing course materials that promote learning, for example, course syllabi, website, essay or exam questions, paper topics command of the subject area ability to motivate students engagement in departmental and campuswide activities that enhance teaching and learning This year's Outstanding GSI recipients are: Philipp Kempski, Casey Lam, and Nathan Sandford
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Professor Eugene Chiang Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Recipient of 2019 Noyce Prize
April 18, 2019
Nine UC Berkeley faculty have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a prestigious nonpartisan research center that convenes scholars and leaders in academic, business and government sectors, drawing expertise across disciplines, to address the most complex challenges of our time.
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Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Hole
April 10, 2019
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. Today, in coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers reveal that they have succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of a supermassive black hole and its shadow. This breakthrough was announced today in a series of six papers published in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87 [1], a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the Sun [2]. The EHT links telescopes around the globe to form an Earth-sized virtual telescope with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution [3]. The EHT is the result of years of international collaboration, and offers scientists a new way to study the most extreme objects in the Universe predicted by Einstein’s general relativity during the centennial year of the historic experiment that first confirmed the theory [4]. "We have taken the first picture of a black hole," said EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. "This is an extraordinary scientific feat accomplished by a team of more than 200 researchers." Black holes are extraordinary cosmic objects with enormous masses but extremely compact sizes. The presence of these objects affects their environment in extreme ways, warping spacetime and super-heating any surrounding material. Continue reading...
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2019 Class of 51 Pegasi b Fellows Announced
March 27, 2019
The Heising-Simons Foundation is pleased to announce the 2019 recipients of the 51 Pegasi b Fellowship in planetary astronomy. Recipients are recognized for their outstanding research achievements, their creativity, and their great promise in tackling risky and novel ideas. Winners include Cheng Li, who is currently a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This fall, he will join the UC Berkeley astronomy department to conduct his postdoctoral studies. Cheng will use information recently collected from the Juno mission to challenge and refine theories about the atmospheres of giant planets. His work will include profiling exotic cloud-forming materials on distant worlds to better understand their formation, distribution, and dissipation. He will be mentored by Professor Imke de Pater.
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UC Berkeley researchers discover farthest star ever observed, 9 billion light years away
March 25, 2019
The most distant star ever observed — at a distance of about nine billion light years — was captured using the Hubble Space Telescope by a group of researchers, including members of the UC Berkeley department of astronomy. The star, named MACS J1149 Lensed Star 1, or LS1, was observed in April 2016 when researchers were examining images of a distant supernova, according to campus astronomy professor Alex Filippenko.
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Exiled planet linked to stellar flyby 3 million years ago
February 28, 2019
Some of the peculiar aspects of our solar system — an enveloping cloud of comets, dwarf planets in weird orbits and, if it truly exists, a possible Planet Nine far from the sun — have been linked to the close approach of another star in our system’s infancy that flung things helter-skelter. But are stellar flybys really capable of knocking planets, comets and asteroids askew, reshaping entire planetary systems? UC Berkeley and Stanford University astronomers think they have now found a smoking gun.
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Neptune’s newest, tiniest moon likely piece of bigger one
February 27, 2019
In the journal Nature on Wednesday, California astronomers shine a light on the 21-mile-diameter moon Hippocamp, named after the mythological sea horse. The SETI Institute's Mark Showalter discovered Neptune's 14th moon in 2013, using Hubble Space Telescope images. Showalter and his research team theorize Hippocamp was formed from debris created billions of years ago when a comet slammed into Proteus, the largest of Neptune's inner moons. The two moons orbit just 7,500 miles apart and were likely even closer in the past before Proteus migrated outward.
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Assistant Professor Courtney Dressing is Awarded Sloan Research Fellowship
February 20, 2019
Seven assistant professors from the fields of astronomy, biology, computer science, economics and statistics have been named 2019 Sloan Research Fellows. This year’s UC Berkeley recipients are Courtney Dressing, Shirshendu Ganguly, Moritz Hardt, Sergey Levine, Priya Moorjani, Philipp Strack and Gabriel Zucman.
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