News

This month, PSD researchers have been featured for investigating questions in biodiversity, studying salt deposits on Mars, and discussing online privacy. In case you missed it, review our news headlines from August 2019.

 

Postdoctoral Fellow Stephanie Olson comments on new geological discovery of 'massive pool' of methane and posits that it could have astrobiological significance.

Live Science interviews Madore to weigh in on why researchers produce conflicting results when attempting to measure the rate of cosmic expansion. 

Mini-EUSO hitched a ride with Russia's Soyuz MS14 to the International Space Station. Mini-EUSO is a prototype for two University of Chicago-led experiments, EUSO-SPB2 and POEMMA, which aim to discover the origin of the highest-energy particles and to study their sources and interactions.

Geophysical Sciences postdoc, Stephanie Olson, suggests that exoplanets with favorable ocean circulation patterns could be better suited to support life than Earth itself. 

Researchers found traces of Iron-60, an extremely rare isotope produced when a star explodes, in Antarctica. Research Prof. Priscilla Frisch weighs in on how this interstellar dust made it's way to Earth.  

The University of Chicago has named its Physics Research Center in honor of former faculty member and founding physics department chair Albert A. Michelson, a pioneering scientist who was the first American to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The 1907 prize honored his field-defining work, including taking the first accurate measurement of the speed of light. 

Ellen works as the business administrator in the Flash Center for Computational Science in Astronomy & Astrophysics. She was born in Evanston and raised in Edgewater and Wilmette, IL. She has been a member of the PSD community for six and a half years. 

A new study by UChicago researchers shakes up the picture of Martian salt—and offers new ways to test what Mars’ water would have looked like. Asst. Prof. Edwin Kite’s team analyzed salt deposits and built models to help determine how and why Mars dried out. 

Prof. Daniel Holz discusses the detection of gravitational waves that may have been from a black hole swallowing a neutron star with Science News Magazine. 

 

Prof. Daniel Holz discusses research on black hole pairing and tripling and explains how this research can help scientists measure the eccentricities of black holes' orbits in the near future.  

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day features the 1901 photograph, The Orion Nebula, taken by George Ritchey at Yerkes Observatory. The original glass photographic plate, sensitive to green and blue wavelengths, has been digitized and light-to-dark inverted to produce a positive image. Ritchey's plates from over a hundred years ago preserve astronomical data and can still be used for exploring astrophysical processes. Digitization project: W. Cerny, R. Kron, Y. Liang, J. Lin, M. Martinez, E. Medina, B. Moss, B. Ogonor, M. Ransom, J. Sanchez (Univ. of Chicago)