This video was created by CIERA’s Associate Director, Shane Larson, for Physics & Astronomy graduate student recruitment in the Spring of 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 “lockdown” period.
Artist’s interpretation of the calcium-rich supernova 2019ehk. Shown in orange is the calcium-rich material created in the explosion. Purple coloring represents gas shedded by the star right before the explosion, which then produced bright X-ray emission when the material collided with the supernova shockwave. Learn more: Calcium-rich supernova examined with X-rays for first time
Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University
The afterglow of GRB181123B, captured by the Gemini North telescope. Learn more: Short gamma ray burst leaves most-distant optical afterglow ever detected
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/K. Paterson & W. Fong (Northwestern University).
Zwicky Transient Facility composite image of SN2019yvq (blue dot in the center of the image) in the host galaxy NGC 4441 (large yellow galaxy in the center of the image), which is nearly 140 million light-years away from Earth. SN 2019yvq exhibited a rarely observed ultraviolet flash in the days after the star exploded. Learn
ZTF/A. A. Miller (Northwestern University) and D. Goldstein (Caltech)
A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified by an international team of astronomers. Continue to the full article at University of Birmingham News. View the Nature Astronomy article, “An extremely energetic supernova from a very massive star in a dense medium”
Aaron M. Geller – Northwestern IT
A direct image of CSS161010’s host galaxy taken with W. M. Keck Observatory’s DEIMOS instrument, shown in the bottom square and magnified in the larger top square. Observations show it is a dwarf galaxy located 500,000,000 light years away in the direction of the constellation Eridanus. Learn more: Astrophysicists Capture New Class of Transient Objects
Giacomo Terreran, CIERA/Northwestern University
A detailed simulation of a black hole’s accretion disc created by a global team of computational astrophysicists – including CIERA’s Prof. Sasha Tchekhovskoy – solved a decades-old mystery. The accretion disc is matter that orbits and then falls into a black hole. Researchers discovered how the disc aligns with the hole’s equator, details vital to
Episode 8 of the documentary series “LIGO: The Discovery that Shook the World” features CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera discussing the science of future LIGO instruments (the detectors that observe gravitational waves). All 8 episodes can be found on YouTube.
The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project was a collaboration among Caltech, MIT, the LIGO Laboratory and director Les Guthman that made the feature documentary, “LIGO,” and the eight-part video series, THE DISCOVERY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD, about LIGO’s major gravitational wave discoveries 2015-2017 and the birth of the new era of gravitational wave astronomy.
The Universe is vast beyond anything humans can easily comprehend, and it is easy to become overwhelmed by the immensity, disheartened by how insignificant we seem. But in the vastness there is a glimmer of truth that we should hold onto and use to guide us: in all the vastness we are, so far as
TEDxGVSU
This lecture was presented by award-winning author and Yale professor Dr. Priyamvada Natarajan at Cahn Auditorium on October 24, 2019. Natarajan discussed how mapping over time encodes radical new scientific ideas. She walked through the history of the acceptance of new astronomical ideas, and talked about the status of several current transformative (and deeply contested)
Left: NASA Spitzer image showing the portion of the Rho Oph dark cloud observed with HAWC+ instrument….
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA. SOFIA/ HAWC+/ Northwestern University /F. Pereira Santos
This image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows spiral galaxy NGC 7331, center, in a three-color X-ray image….
Cliff Johnson (Northwestern University) and colleagues took this image using the Dark Energy Camera on the 4-meter Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Nineteen Starlink satellite trails crossed the image during the six-minute exposure. The image was taken as part of the DELVE survey, which is mapping the outskirts of the Magellanic Clouds,
DELVE Survey / CTIO / AURA / NSF
Emmy-award winning television writer and former political operative Eli Attie interviewed by CIERA Director, Vicky Kalogera, in the McCormick Auditorium, on science in the world of pop culture, as part of 2019 NSF Research Traineeship National Meeting.
Andrew Connolly Public Lecture at the 2019 HotWired Conference in Evanston, IL.
An international team of astronomers, including Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, has discovered one of the largest structures ever observed in the Milky Way. A newly spotted pair of radio-emitting bubbles reach hundreds of light-years tall, dwarfing all other structures in the central region of the galaxy.
