The April 8, 2024 solar eclipse, photographed by CIERA Postdoctoral Associate Meng Sun. This image of the partial eclipse before totality was captured in New Castle, Indiana, USA. Sun spots can be seen just above the moon and on the upper left of the sun. New Castle was located close to the center of eclipse’s
Meng Sun/CIERA/Northwestern
The April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse, photographed by CIERA Postdoctoral Associate Meng Sun. This composite image of all phases of the eclipse was captured in New Castle, Indiana, USA. New Castle was located close to the center of eclipse’s path of totality, meaning that totality lasted longer than at the edges of the path
Meng Sun/CIERA/Northwestern
The May 2023 full moon, photographed by graduate student and CIERA member Imran Sultan. This image won runner-up in the 2023 Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition’s astronomy category. “The May full moon is known as the Flower Moon, a name originating from the Algonquin peoples that marks the blooming of flowers during spring. This year’s
Imran Sultan/Northwestern
This is the longest time-lapse footage of an exoplanet to date, all made with real data. Beta Pictoris b is a 12 Jupiter mass planet orbiting its star at a distance of 10 AU (10x Earth-Sun distance) on a near-edge on orbit. The first image of the planet was obtained in 2003. However, the planet’s
On May 27, 2023, CIERA Research Assistant Professor Aaron Geller and former NSF Graduate Fellow Alex Gurvich were featured on the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Journal Author Series to showcase Firefly, their new browser-based interactive tool for visualizing 3D particle data sets. Geller and Gurvich were interviewed by the AAS’s Frank Timmes. Read the full news story
Professor David Bercovici presents an Interdisciplinary Colloquium on March 30, 2023, organized by Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. Read the full CIERA News story here.
Professor Edwin Kite presents an Interdisciplinary Colloquium on February 21, 2023, organized by Northwestern University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics. Read the full CIERA News story here.
Using observations collected from 2009 to 2021 CIERA Professor Jason Wang has assembled a time lapse video of HR8799, the first directly imaged extrasolar planetary system. The video shows a family of four exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, orbiting their star and gives viewers an unprecedented glimpse into planetary motion. To construct the video,
Jason Wang/Northwestern/CIERA
For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has been used to directly image an exoplanet — that’s a planet outside of our solar system. Although it’s not the first time an exoplanet has been directly imaged, it is the first time the Webb Telescope’s powerful gaze has been turned to the task. And
This image shows the exoplanet HIP 65426 b in different bands of infrared light, as seen from the James Webb Space Telescope: purple shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 3.00 micrometers, blue shows the NIRCam instrument’s view at 4.44 micrometers, yellow shows the MIRI instrument’s view at 11.4 micrometers, and red shows the MIRI instrument’s
NASA/ESA/CSA, A Carter (UCSC), the ERS 1386 team and A. Pagan (STScI)
This lecture was presented on October 14, 2021 by Dr. Phil Plait, astronomer and best-selling author. Plait discussed the explosion in exoplanet detections since the 1990s (over four thousand so far!). These planets orbit a wide variety of stars, and themselves are all wildly different; huge, small, hot, cold, airless, or with thick atmospheres. The
PhD student Newlin Weatherford, who holds the Riedel Family Graduate Fellowship at CIERA, captured the Great Conjunction (“Christmas Star”) of Jupiter and Saturn on December 21, 2020 at 6:20 pm PT from Novato, California. Using his Panasonic DZ1000, Newlin wasn’t able to resolve Saturn’s rings, but we can see Callisto and Io and many faint
Newlin Weatherford, Northwestern CIERA
Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope – The Next Generation (BLAST-TNG) BLAST is a 5,000 pound balloon-borne telescope bound for the stratosphere over Antarctica, to search for the origins of stars and planets. This photo was taken by graduate student Paul Williams in the summer of 2018 in Palestine, Texas at the Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility.
Gabriele Coppi / University of Pennsylvania
Northwestern Physics and Astronomy student Paul Williams presents a talk as part of the Northwestern Ready Set Go (RSG) program. The goals of the program are to increase awareness for the urgent need for excellent research communicators and to coach graduate and post doctoral researchers to improve their own presentation skills. The program focuses on three important
Northwestern's RSG Program
Developed by astronomer and musician Kyle Kremer, Cosmos in Concert brings together astronomy and live classical music to entertain and educate audiences. Through multimedia shows, in-school residencies, and public outreach events, Cosmos in Concert introduces a new platform for science education and outreach. Cosmos in Concert
Kyle Kremer / Northwestern
This movie, Life of the Pleiades, was generated from an interactive visualization that Aaron Geller developed with Mark SubbaRao using Uniview. The interactive version can be shown on a planetarium dome, or rendered into a movie (as shown here). A 3D version of this movie exists in the Space Visualization Lab at the Adler Planetarium.
Created by A. M. Geller and M. SubbaRao, using Uniview; music, narration and audio by A. M. Geller; dynamical calculation with stellar evolution performed using the NBODY6 code.
Postdoctoral researcher Deanne Coppejans was the Northwestern media contact for the 2017 total solar eclipse. Here she is describing the science of the eclipse on NBC Chicago.
NBC Chicago
