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...
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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...
A Supernova that Outshines All Others
A supernova at least twice as bright and energetic, and likely much more massive than any yet recorded has been identified by an international...
CIERA’s Sasha Tchekhovskoy to Utilize the Fastest Academic Supercomputer in the World
The Texas Advanced Computing Center announced that the National Science Foundation has approved allocations of supercomputing time on Frontera to 49 science projects for...
Professors Kalogera and Rasio Named in Legacy Group of AAS Fellows
The American Astronomical Society (AAS), the major organization of professional astronomers in North America, has established a new accolade, Fellow of the AAS, to...
This Exoplanet is in a Death Dance with its Star
Planets tend to suffer the consequences as the stars they orbit go through different phases. And in about three million years, the exoplanet known...
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,...
First Discoveries by the Young Supernova Experiment
The Northwestern-based YSE team is excited to announce the start of the Young Supernova Experiment, a new transient discovery survey using the Pan-STARRS1...
CIERA Observer’s Image Gets “Starlinked”
On November 18, CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow Cliff Johnson and his collaborator Clara Martínez-Vázquez were hoping to observe stars in a pair of nearby...
“‘Are we alone?’ Study refines which exoplanets are potentially habitable”
“…“For most of human history, the question of whether or not life exists elsewhere has belonged only within the philosophical realm,” said Northwestern’s Howard...
“A star has been flickering for years – and researchers think they’ve figured out why”
“(Inside Science) — In 2015, astronomers noticed that a star named KIC 8462852 was flickering unusually. Some researchers suggested that the observations could potentially...