Brainstorm is a podcast by the Daily Northwestern which looks into scientific facts and fiction and the reasons why we believe in them. When you look up at the night sky, do you ever wonder where all those stars came from? Host Neya Thanikachalam spoke to CIERA’s Jeff Andrews to find out. The Daily Northwestern
Vicky Kalogera is a professor of physics and astronomy at Northwestern University and Director of the CIERA Center – leading research, studying the cosmos and making new discoveries. This interview is a special Women’s History Month 2021 segment for CBS Chicago.
Maya Fishbach uses gravitational waves to probe the universe’s most extreme objects — black holes and neutron stars. Her research aims to understand where, when and how these systems of merging compact objects are made. As a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, she analyzes gravitational-wave data to study the population properties of colliding black
The surrounding environment of SGRB 161104A, which includes a galaxy cluster. Image taken by the Magellan Telescopes. Learn more.
Nugent et al. 2020
The massive black hole in M33 X-7 is hidden in the X-ray bright center of the pancake-like accretion disk of matter. The black-hole’s hot (blue) and massive star companion is losing mass in a wind that gets pulled and captured by the black hole. Learn more.
NU Viz and CIERA: Matthew McCrory, Francesca Valsecchi, and Vicky Kalogera
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
Professor Wen-fai Fong is interviewed for The Cosmic Companion and talks about her work studying kilonova explosions and collisions of neutron stars.
From Purdue University’s Long Tales of Science podcast, hear CIERA’s Dr. Sarah Wellons, an astrophysicist who uses high performance computing resources to run massive simulations of galaxy formation, and her mother, Dr. Helen Wellons, a retired chemical engineer who used parallel computing to deploy computational modeling applications to optimize real-time refinery operations at ExxonMobil.
This image shows the glow from a kilonova caused by the merger of two neutron stars. The kilonova, whose peak brightness reaches up to 10,000 times that of a classical nova, appears as a bright spot (indicated by the arrow) to the upper left of the host galaxy. The merger of the neutron stars is
This animation shows the increasing sample of gravitational wave sources, starting before LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA went online (with only electromagnetic, EM, sources) and then moving through the three main data releases that are now available (GTWC-1, GWTC-2.1, and GWTC-3). Watch as the sample of merging black holes and neutron stars has dramatically increased over the past few
Visualization: LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA / Aaron Geller / Northwestern
On October 28, 2020 CIERA’s Shane Larson presented this public lecture titled A Storm of Stars: A Living History of the Milky Way in a virtual Zoom webinar format to an audience of nearly 450 viewers. Larson discussed how we came to understand the Milky Way, our home galaxy, and how our ideas about the
Gabriel Casabona, a theoretical astrophysicist who specializes in binary neutron star mergers, gives an interview with Suzette Lyn.
Suzette Lyn
Dr. Josiah Schwab presents “1 + 1 = 1: Single White Dwarfs from Double White Dwarf Mergers.” Dr. Schwab is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Cruz. This seminar is part of the Astrophysics Seminar series at CIERA.
CIERA
Dr. Marla Geha presents “The Saga Survey: Exploring Satellite Galaxies Around the Milky Way Analogs.” Dr. Geha is a professor of astronomy and the Director of Telescope Resources at Yale University. This seminar is part of the Astrophysics Seminar series at CIERA.
CIERA
This movie demonstrates the propagation of a relativistic jet following the Neutron star merger GW170817. Credit: Ore Gottlieb
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).
