New Mystery Merger Detected by LIGO-Virgo
Image Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC) In August of 2019, the LIGO-Virgo gravitational-wave network witnessed the merger of a black hole with 23 times the...
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CIERA’s Nancy Aggarwal Wins GWIC-Braccini Thesis Prize
Postdoctoral Fellow Nancy Aggarwal has won the 2019 GWIC-Braccini Thesis Prize for her thesis “A room temperature optomechanical squeezer.” Nancy received her Ph.D. from Massachusetts...
Astrophysicists Capture New Class of Transient Objects
Artist’s illustration comparing FBOTs to normal supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF ‘A new beast is out there,’ researcher says of object...
Using Gravitational Waves to Approximate Pi
Image Credit: Igor Sokalski Getty Images At least 3,700 years ago, Babylonian mathematicians approximated the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. They...
NASA Einstein Postdoc Kate Alexander Named to Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties”
CIERA researcher Kate Alexander is featured in Crain’s “20 in Their Twenties” for 2020. She earned a doctorate in astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard...
Astronomers Find First-Ever Collision of Black Holes With a Strange Mass Discrepancy
Just over a year ago, on 12 April 2019, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration made a detection of gravitational waves, rippling out across space-time from...
Beverly Lowell Awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Second-year CIERA graduate student Beverly Lowell was awarded the National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellowship for the upcoming year and received the Illinois Space...
Danat Issa Awarded Frontera Computational Science Fellowship
CIERA graduate student Danat Issa was awarded the Frontera Computational Science Fellowship, a distinguished program that provides a year-long opportunity for talented graduate students...
The Sky is No Limit
New remote observatory compresses distances to connect Evanston and Hawaii, allowing Northwestern researchers to venture boldly into space without leaving home “Northwestern astronomers have...
CIERA REU Students Present at 235th Meeting of the AAS
Students from CIERA’s summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program and the LSSTC Enabling Science program presented their research projects at the 235th American...
Using Gravitational Waves to See Inside Stars
Astronomers have predicted how to look inside stars using gravitational waves, allowing researchers to determine the structure of stars using this new method of...
An experiment that solved a 100-year-old mystery posed by Einstein just got up to 50% more powerful by squeezing light
“That’s thanks to a new light-squeezing instrument that researchers installed in the experiment’s main machine: the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Its Italian counterpart, Virgo,...