Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, visiting professor at the University of Oxford and chancellor of Scotland’s University of Dundee, enthralled a capacity audience in the Irvine Barclay Theatre on the UCI campus Tuesday night as she delivered the 2019 Reines Lecture. Bell Burnell, named dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2007, recounted […]
Effectiveness of tool is demonstrated on recent super-Earth discovery at Barnard’s star
UCI’s Frederick Reines Hall is home to happy astronomers after this week’s announcement of NASA’s selection of the new Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer mission. The two-year, $242 million SPHEREx is targeted to launch in 2023. Asantha Cooray, UCI professor of physics & astronomy, will head one […]
UCI expects to double number of graduate students in Cal-Bridge program
Asteroid 1978VT8 has a new name. The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union recently dubbed it 9271Trimble in honor of Virginia Trimble, UCI professor of physics & astronomy. “With roughly 7 billion people in the world and 700,000 known asteroids, one person in 10,000 could have one of these entities named after them, […]
UCI, other astronomers find plane of dwarf satellites orbiting Centaurus A
Astronomers can learn a lot about planets outside our solar system, including whether they’re capable of supporting life, by studying their surface albedo, or reflectivity. Aomawa Shields, UCI Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Physics & Astronomy, recently won a grant from the NASA Habitable Worlds program to research this characteristic of planets orbiting relatively […]
Researchers expect more gravitational-wave evidence of collisions in the near future
A research team including Jing Xia, UCI associate professor of physics & astronomy, has reported finding firm evidence for Majorana fermions, part of a class of subatomic particles which includes the proton, neutron, electron, neutrino and quark. Publishing their findings this week in Science, the team describes their experiment where researchers from UCI and UCLA […]
UCI astronomer James Bullock has been appointed chair of the James Webb Space Telescope users committee. The group, which includes 10 to 14 American, European and Canadian scientists, was established to ensure that the observatory is operated in such a way as to maximize its scientific performance. The JWST, successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, […]