Posts Tagged Department of Physics and Astronomy

Combined with the current weakening of Earth’s magnetic field, the data suggest that the region of Earth’s core beneath southern Africa may play a special role in reversals of the planet’s magnetic poles.

Okubo, a Rochester alumnus and faculty member since 1964, was internationally known for his groundbreaking investigations into the patterns and decay rates of fundamental particles and symmetries of the universe.

The best guide to the boundary between our everyday world and the “spooky” features of the quantum world has been a theorem called Bell’s Inequality, but now a new paper shows that we understand the frontiers of that quantum world less well than scientists have thought.

The National Science Foundation has granted its most prestigious award in support of junior faculty, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, to three University researchers: Antonio Badolato, Danielle Benoit, and Michael Neidig.

Some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe produce high-energy gamma rays, and a new observatory in Mexico aims to expand the catalog of known gamma ray sources.

A recently discovered dim star likely passed some 70,000 years ago through our solar system’s distant cloud of comets known as the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this closely.

Rochester astronomers, along with colleagues at the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands have discovered that the ring system that they see eclipse the very young Sun-like star J1407 is of enormous proportions, much larger and heavier than the ring system of Saturn.

In what they call a “weird little corner” of the already weird world of neutrinos, physicists have found evidence that these tiny particles might be involved in a surprising reaction. In an experiment conducted with the international MINERvA collaboration at Fermilab, physics professor Kevin McFarland and his students and colleagues provide evidence that neutrinos can sometimes interact with a nucleus but leave it basically untouched, resulting in a new particle being created out of a vacuum.

“Simulated molecular clouds are beautiful, intricate, and ever-changing — properties that make them ideal candidates for high-powered visualization,” wrote PhD student Erica Kaminski about her award-winning images.

How long can a technological civilization last? Will human-caused climate change or species extinctions threaten its collapse or can industrial development continue without restrictions? In a new paper, two astrophysicists argue that these questions may soon be resolvable scientifically.