2024-10-10

A heavy use of computational tools can help to detect what has yet to be discovered, according to Chad Hanna, professor of physics and of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State.

Hanna, who started at the University in 2014 and is a Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) co-hire, works in a large research group as part of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Hanna’s research team, which includes Research Innovations with Scientists and Engineers (RISE) team member Ron Tapia, is working to discover astrophysical events — such as gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 — caused by the merger of two black holes or other celestial objects.

“The LIGO observatory measures tiny distortions in space that are caused by the merging black holes,” Hanna said. “We are learning about the universe through measuring these tiny distortions in space. It’s a big effort that requires a lot of people for observations to run sustainably day and night.”

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How do supermassive black holes get super massive?

2024-09-09

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — By combining forefront X-ray observations with state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations of the buildup of galaxies over cosmic history, researchers have provided the best modeling to date of the growth of the supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies. Using this hybrid approach, a research team led by Penn State astronomers derived a complete picture of black-hole growth over 12 billion years, from the Universe’s infancy at around 1.8 billion years old to now at 13.8 billion years old.

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2024-08-26

Using the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, an international collaboration puts the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up the universe’s invisible mass.

The nature of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up most of the mass in our universe, is one of the greatest mysteries in physics. Using new results from the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ), an international collaboration that includes Penn State researchers has narrowed down the possible properties of one of the leading candidates for the particles that compose dark matter: weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs.

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First flight of HELIX

2024-07-10

The High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment is designed to measure various isotopes of cosmic ray nuclei, which are sensitive to the history of propagation of these energetic particles through our Milky Way galaxy, and which are linked to energetic interactions in the interstellar medium (yielding antimatter as well as rare nuclei). The instrument had its first stratospheric balloon flight on May 28, 2024 from the Esrange rocket/balloon base in northern Sweden, landing on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic after more than 6 days. The Penn State group includes IGC faculty Stephane Coutu and Isaac Mognet, and past and present students Heather Allen, Carl Chen, Alex Pazoki and Monong Yu.

2024-06-18

When stars collapse, they can leave behind incredibly dense but relatively small and cold remnants called neutron stars. If two stars collapse in close proximity, the leftover binary neutron stars spiral in and eventually collide, and the interface where the two stars begin merging becomes incredibly hot. New simulations of these events show hot neutrinos — tiny, essentially massless particles that rarely interact with other matter — that are created during the collision can be briefly trapped at these interfaces and remain out of equilibrium with the cold cores of the merging stars for 2 to 3 milliseconds. During this time, the simulations show that the neutrinos can weakly interact with the matter of the stars, helping to drive the particles back toward equilibrium — and lending new insight into the physics of these powerful events.

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2024-06-11

A team of astronomers, including Penn State researchers, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has used eight years of monitoring observations to discover unexpected changes in the winds surrounding a distant black hole.

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2024-06-11

A team of astronomers, including Penn State researchers, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has used eight years of monitoring observations to discover unexpected changes in the winds surrounding a distant black hole.

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2024-03-21

Astronomers have revealed that a brilliant supermassive black hole is not living up to expectations. Although it is responsible for high levels of radiation and powerful jets, this giant black hole is not as influential on its surroundings as many of its counterparts in other galaxies. A team including IGC faculty W. Niel Brandt, the Eberly Family Chair Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and professor of physics at Penn State, recently published this study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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2024-03-12

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic-kilometer-sized neutrino telescope at the South Pole, has observed a new kind of astrophysical messenger. In a new study recently accepted for publication as an Editors' Suggestion by the journal Physical Review Letters and available online as a preprint, the IceCube collaboration, including Penn State researchers, presented the discovery of seven of the once-elusive astrophysical tau neutrinos.

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2024-01-04

Unnati Akhour is a Mildred Dresselhaus Science Achievement Graduate Fellow in Physics who was recently an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) Mass Media Fellow at WITF, Inc.

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