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10/20/2011

Oceans of Water in a Planet-Forming Disk

Marcus Woo

Astronomers have detected massive quantities of water in a planet-forming gas disk around a young star. The water—which is frozen in the icy outer regions of the disk—could fill Earth's oceans several thousand times over. The discovery could help explain how Earth got its oceans and suggests that our planet may not be the only watery world in the cosmos.

10/18/2011

Thorne Selected to Receive Graduate Education Award

Kimm Fesenmaier

Kip Thorne, Caltech's Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, has been selected to receive the 2012 John David Jackson Excellence in Graduate Physics Education Award from the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT).

10/14/2011

Caltech Awarded $12.6 Million for New Institute for Quantum Information and Matter

Kimm Fesenmaier

Caltech has been awarded $12.6 million in funding over the next five years by the National Science Foundation to create a new Physics Frontiers Center. Dubbed the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM), the center will bring physicists and computer scientists together to push theoretical and experimental boundaries in the study of exotic quantum states.

10/05/2011

Caltech Named World's Top University in New Times Higher Education Global Ranking

Kathy Svitil

Caltech has been rated the world's number one university in the 2011–2012 Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 200 universities, displacing Harvard University from the top spot for the first time in the survey's eight-year history.

10/05/2011

Caltech Team Uses Laser Light to Cool Object to Quantum Ground State

Kimm Fesenmaier

For the first time, researchers at Caltech, in collaboration with a team from the University of Vienna, have managed to cool a miniature mechanical object to its lowest possible energy state using laser light. The achievement paves the way for the development of exquisitely sensitive detectors as well as for quantum experiments that scientists have long dreamed of conducting.

09/12/2011

Students Kick Off KISS Caltech Space Challenge

Katie Neith

Deadline can be a dirty word for students and faculty alike at Caltech, since innovative research rarely adheres to time constraints. But this week, an international group of 32 students are taking on a particularly ambitious project that will push the limits of both time and space. As participants in the Caltech Space Challenge, they are tasked with designing a human mission to an asteroid by Friday, giving them just five days to complete a project that typically takes years.

08/25/2011

Astronomers Discover a Black Hole Ripping a Star Apart

Marcus Woo

Astronomers—including several from Caltech—have discovered a black hole millions of times more massive than the sun that's tearing a star to shreds.

08/24/2011

New LIGO Executive Director Named

Kathy Svitil

David Reitze has been named executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), designed and operated by Caltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Reitze has also been named a senior research associate at Caltech.

08/22/2011

Astronomers Find Ice and Possibly Methane on Snow White, a Distant Dwarf Planet

Marcus Woo

Astronomers at Caltech have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10—nicknamed Snow White—is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed from ancient, slush-spewing volcanoes. The new findings also suggest that the red-tinged dwarf planet may be covered in a thin layer of methane, the remnants of an atmosphere that's slowly being lost into space.

08/18/2011

Neutrino Experiment Starts Taking Data

Marcus Woo

A new experiment that will answer fundamental questions about neutrinos, aiming to solve some of the biggest mysteries about the universe—why there's so much more matter than antimatter, for example—is now open for business. About two weeks ago, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, lying underground in the mountains of southern China near Hong Kong, began taking data with its first set of twin detectors.

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