Research

  • Courtney Dressing awarded 2019 Packard Fellowship

    October 17, 2019

    Courtney Dressing’s ongoing search for planets around other stars has won her a prestigious Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. Dressing is one of 22 early career scientists and engineers nationwide who will funding over five years to pursue their research. The new fellows were announced this week by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.   

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  • New Instrument Extends the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence to New Realms

    March 23, 2015

    From Astronomy Magazine: "Astronomers have expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light. Their new instrument has just begun to scour the sky for messages from other worlds. “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright from the University of California (UC) in San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics. Pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust…

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  • Distant Supernova Split Four Ways by Gravitational Lens

    March 6, 2015

    From release by Robert Sanders:  "Over the past several decades, astronomers have come to realize that the sky is filled with magnifying glasses that allow the study of very distant and faint objects barely visible with even the largest telescopes. A University of California, Berkeley, astronomer has now found that one of these lenses – a massive galaxy within a cluster of galaxies that are gravitationally bending and magnifying light – has created four separate images of a distant supernova. The so-called “Einstein cross” will allow a unique study of a distant supernova and the distribution of dark matter in…

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  • Google gives Lick Observatory $1 million

    February 13, 2015

    Copied from original article located here. By Robert Sanders - February 10th 2015 Google Inc. has given $1 million to the University of California’s Lick Observatory in what astronomers hope is the first of many private gifts to support an invaluable teaching and research resource for the state. The unrestricted funds, spread over two years, will go toward general expenses, augmenting the $1.5 million the UC Office of the President gives annually to operate the mountaintop observatory for the 10-campus UC system. “Lick Observatory has been making important discoveries while training generations of scientists for more than 100 years,” said Chris…

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