Tag Space & astronomy
They know the drill: UW leads the league in boring through ice sheets
Hollow coring drills designed and managed by UW–Madison’s Ice Drilling Design and Operations (IDDO) program are used to extract ice cores that can analyze the past atmosphere. Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at UW–Madison, was the first author of a paper published today in the journal Nature documenting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 23,000 and 9,000 years ago, based on data from an 11,000-foot hole in Antarctica.
Beginning of time to unfold at UW–Madison Space Place
Eavesdrop on the beginning of time this Friday evening (May 30, 2014) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Space Place, 2300 S. Park St.
New Milky Way portrait to be on Town Center media wall
The dramatic new infrared picture of the plane of our galaxy will be viewable for the next week on the large media wall in the Town Center of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery on the UW–Madison campus.
Dramatic new portrait helps define Milky Way’s shape, contents
Using more than 2 million images collected by NASA’s orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, a team of Wisconsin scientists has stitched together a dramatic 360-degree portrait of the Milky Way, providing new details of our galaxy’s structure and contents.
Nathan Whitehorn a 2014 ‘Young Star’ in astrophysics
Nathan Whitehorn, a postdoctoral researcher on the IceCube project at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been named a “Young Star” by the Division of Astrophysics of the American Physical Society (APS).
Fledgling supernova remnant reveals neutron star’s secrets
With the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Australia Telescope Compact Array, an international team of astronomers has identified the glowing wreck of a star that exploded a mere 2,500 years ago — the blink of an eye in astronomical terms.
IceCube pushes neutrinos to the forefront of astronomy
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector buried in the Antarctic ice, is a demonstration of the power of the human passion for discovery, where scientific ingenuity meets technological innovation.
Astronaut scholarship honors undergrad’s adventures in research
Even in the University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Engineering, where undergraduates are encouraged to seek hands-on experience, it’s rare that a faculty member finds himself taken aback by a freshman’s eagerness to get involved in research.
The sun also flips: 11-year solar cycle wimpy, but peaking
In a 3-meter diameter hollow aluminum sphere, Cary Forest, a University of Wisconsin–Madison physics professor, is stirring and heating plasmas to 500,000 degrees Fahrenheit to experimentally mimic the magnetic field-inducing cosmic dynamos at the heart of planets, stars and other celestial bodies.
Exhibiting signs of life
What if you could travel back in time 3 billion years, and take a breath? What would earth’s air smell like? Deeply stinky, according to Brooke Norsted, an outreach specialist for the University of Wisconsin–Madison Geology Museum.
Observations reveal critical interplay of interstellar dust, hydrogen
For astrophysicists, the interplay of hydrogen - the most common molecule in the universe - and the vast clouds of dust that fill the voids of interstellar space has been an intractable puzzle of stellar evolution.
UW brings outreach to Epic’s ‘Deep Space’
Hosting a series of exhibits on Epic Systems campus in Verona for the health care software company’s massive annual users’ group meeting, UW–Madison researchers and outreach experts focused on “Deep Space,” the name of Epic’s new underground auditorium, as a common theme to demonstrate how campus research is making an impact in and out of this world.
Massive storm pulls water and ammonia ices from Saturn’s depths
Now, thanks to near-infrared spectral measurements taken by NASA’s Cassini orbiter and analysis of near-infrared color signatures by researchers at UW–Madison, Saturn’s superstorm is helping scientists flesh out a picture of the composition of the planet’s atmosphere at depths typically obscured by a thick high-altitude haze.
IceCube Neutrino Observatory reports first evidence for extraterrestrial high-energy neutrinos
A massive telescope in the Antarctic ice reports the detection of 28 extremely high-energy neutrinos that might have their origin in cosmic sources. Two of these reached energies greater than 1 petaelectronvolt (PeV), an energy level thousands of times higher than the highest energy neutrino yet produced in a manmade accelerator.
Experience the South Pole in Madison with an exploration of sound, light and images
Deep in the Antarctic ice, more than 5,000 detector modules sit in frozen darkness, waiting for the blue bursts of radiation released by particle interactions. Optimized to detect signs of neutrinos - tiny, nearly massless particles that can travel from the edges of the universe - these basketball-sized detectors comprise the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, one of the biggest astrophysics projects in the world.