KIPAC Blog
By: Mandeep S.S. Gill and Michael Baumer
Editors: Rachel Wolf, Ross Cawthon, Kathy Romer, Anthony Kremin
For decades, cosmologists have been attempting to piece together the history and composition of the Universe. Since we now know that ~95% of the Universe’s mass-energy content takes the form of invisible dark matter and dark energy, this is a very difficult task... Read More
Now, to bring it a little closer to home from our general astronomical discussion of eclipses, let's check in with some KIPAC folk who actually were in the Totality Zone, and see what their reactions were to the actual event.
M. Gill wrote:
I was with a large group of cousins and their kids in a campground just north of Madras, Oregon. To say it up front: my... Read More
By M.S.S. Gill
The Great American Eclipse of 2017
The Great American Eclipse of 2017 occurred on August 21 in a slightly less than 100-mile-wide strip. It entered the US off the northern Oregon coast and exited off the coast of South Carolina about two hours later (see, for example, here for a clickable path map)—and several KIPAC members made sure to station... Read More
Based on a press release from the SLAC Office of Communications
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, including several KIPAC scientists, are on a quest to solve one of physics’ biggest mysteries: What exactly is dark matter – the invisible substance that accounts for 85 percent of all the matter in the universe but can’t be... Read More
Astrophysicists have a fairly accurate understanding of how the Universe ages: That’s the conclusion of new results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a large international science collaboration, including researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, that put models of cosmic structure formation and evolution to the most precise... Read More
An international team of researchers, most of whom have ties to KIPAC, has shown that the hot diffuse gas that fills the space between the galaxies has the same concentration of iron in all galaxy clusters that were studied in sufficient detail by the Japanese Suzaku satellite.
These results confirm the team's earlier findings regarding the Perseus Cluster,... Read More
Dear KIPACers,
With this Newsletter, we review a series of exciting events and workshops that KIPAC has hosted in 2017, and welcome a new cohort of graduate students and postdocs. We also bid adieu to those who are moving on to the next stage in their careers. See below for details. We’ve also included some dates for upcoming events, and courses of possible... Read More
by Dan Wilkins
Supermassive black holes power some of the most luminous objects we see in the Universe. When material spirals into a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy that is in excess of a million Solar masses, it gives rise to an active galactic nucleus, or AGN (also discussed in two previous KIPAC blogposts: this one focused on observations of... Read More
By Lori Ann White
At first glance, the Blind Analysis workshop hosted by KIPAC last month was only one of many gatherings during a very busy March (which actually started the last few days of February). On the SLAC campus, the Institute hosted the Cosmology with CMB-S4 workshop, and then, immediately began preparing to assist with the New Horizons in Inflationary... Read More
by Kyle Story
Last December, I travelled to the southernmost tip of the Earth to install a new camera on the South Pole Telescope (following a rich tradition of other KIPAC researchers who have travelled to Antarctica and returned to write about it, e.g. Val Monticue and Albert Wandui). This blogpost brings you along for a bit of that journey!
The author working... Read More