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12/02/2013

From Spinning Black Holes to Exploding Stars: A New View of the Energetic Universe

Douglas Smith

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, sees the high-energy X-rays emitted by the densest, hottest regions of the universe. Professor Harrison will describe NuSTAR's unlikely journey and share some of its remarkable results.

11/25/2013

Peering Through the Intergalactic Dust

Cynthia Eller

Where do you go to look at the stars? Away from city lights, certainly. But if you're serious about peering far out into space, to the observable edges of our universe, at submillimeter wavelengths, you have to do a little better than that.

11/21/2013

Himiko and the Cosmic Dawn

Cynthia Eller

Researchers have been using the combined resources of the Hubble Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to probe the primitive nature of Himiko, a distant "space blob."

11/14/2013

Interactions in Space: An Interview with Philip Hopkins

Jessica Stoller-Conrad

"I work on a broad range of topics, but basically I like studying how big things form. I study how galaxies form, how stars form, and how supermassive black holes form. Recently, I started studying how planets form"

Phil Hopkins standing in front of a chalkboard with equations

11/08/2013

John H. Schwarz Wins Physics Frontiers Prize

Cynthia Eller

Schwarz and Michael B. Green of the University of Cambridge were honored for developing superstring theory during their collaboration between 1979 and 1986. The prize comes with a $300,000 award and eligibility for the 2014 Fundamental Physics Prize, which, at $3 million, is one of the largest academic prizes in the world.

11/06/2013

From One Collapsing Star, Two Black Holes Form and Fuse

Jessica Stoller-Conrad

Now new findings by Caltech researchers may help to test a model that helps explain the problem of supermassive black holes existing in the early universe—such black holes would have formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang.

10/28/2013

Building the World's Most Sensitive Detectors: A Conversation with Rana Adhikari

Cynthia Eller

Caltech professor of physics Rana Adhikari has been on a singular quest for 15 years: to detect gravitational waves.

10/16/2013

Sky Survey Captures Key Details of Cosmic Explosions

Katie Neith

Astronomical surveys have been cataloguing the night sky since the beginning of the 20th century. The intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)—led by Caltech—started searching the skies for certain types of stars and related phenomena in February. Two recent papers by iPTF astronomers describe first-time detections.

10/15/2013

Watson Lecture: Let There Be Light: Finding the Earliest Galaxies

Douglas Smith

Richard S. Ellis, the Steele Family Professor of Astronomy, is on the verge of seeing as far back as it is possible to see—not quite back to the dawn of time itself but to the dawn of the first galaxies. He describes the journey at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, October 16, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.

09/25/2013

Spirals of Light May Lead to Better Electronics

Jessica Stoller-Conrad

A group of researchers at Caltech has created the optical equivalent of a tuning fork—a device that can help steady the electrical currents needed to power high-end electronics and stabilize the signals of high-quality lasers.

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