News: Research

Astronomers including Asst. Prof. Alex Ji are one step closer to revealing dark matter enveloping our Milky Way galaxy, thanks to a new map of twelve streams of stars orbiting within our galactic halo. Using doppler calculations, the scientists measured the speeds of stars and their chemical compositions, telling us where they were born.

In this installment of the UChicago News Explainer series, the question of how the Earth and moon formed is answered—as well as the questions of when, what they looked like, and how we know.

This month PSD researchers have been featured for their efforts to find extremely energetic particles from outer space with the PUEO Antarctic balloon mission, teach students how to design, build and calibrate their own devices in the creative machines class, and assemble global experts to discuss internet equity and access.

UChicago scientists hope launch of James Webb Space Telescope will help explore previously ‘unanswerable’ questions.

University of Chicago physicist Abby Vieregg is leading an international experiment that essentially uses the ice in Antarctica as a giant detector to find extremely energetic particles from outer space. Recently approved by NASA, the $20 million project called PUEO will build an instrument to fly above the Antarctic in a balloon, launching in December 2024.

UChicago Magazine catches up with Dave Fischer, AB’87, who works for the Japanese company Astroscale launching solutions to help declutter the 100 million pieces of human-made debris floating in space.

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere—called the corona—sampling particles and characterizing magnetic fields in this dynamic environment. The new milestone marks one major step for the probe named for Professor Emeritus Eugene Parker—and one giant leap for solar science.

A new book by photographer Jessica Wynne called Do Not Erase: Mathematicians and Their Chalkboards (Princeton University Press, 2021) features 110 images of chalk-based investigations by mathematicians around the world—several affiliated with UChicago—alongside their reflections on blackboards as a medium.

Argonne scientists Lindsey Bleem, PhD’13, and Asst. Prof. Clarence Chang, Dept. of Astronomy and Astrophysics, talk about what it’s like to look for signals from the early universe onsite at Antarctica's South Pole Telescope.

The Midwest Center for Computational Materials (MICCoM) is one of five centers in the US where scientists focus on developing software to help predict materials for energy conversion technologies and quantum information science. The team of 34 scientists, led by Professor of Chemistry Giulia Galli, has been recognized with several prestigious awards this year.

The Smithsonian Magazine explores T.C. Chamberlin Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences Darryl Seligman’s idea to send a spacecraft near Jupiter to join up with a chunk of rock and ice as it is flung toward the sun.

A gathering hosted by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Santa Barbara, brought together experts from industry, government, and academia for panels and conversations around internet equity and access.

Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system, before the planets were even formed. Scientists in the Dauphas Origins Lab have published an analysis laying out how these beads, which are found in many meteorites, came to be—and what they can tell us about what happened in the early solar system.

University of Chicago chemistry professor and director Greg Engel discusses the potential of the new $25 million Quantum Leap Challenge Institute for Quantum Sensing for Biophysics and Bioengineering (QuBBE)—ranging from tracking a drug through the membrane and across the cytoplasm of a single cell, to precise demarcation of tumor margins during surgery.

By examining fossilized clams scientists including David Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences, and postdoctoral researcher, Nick Crouch, found that a commonly used protocol hides the true extent of how species live and die through major extinctions. Clams previously assumed to originate before the last great extinction actually originated in a burst of diversification in the aftermath.