At a March 21 NASA telephone news conference, scientists from the U.S. team participating in the European Space Agency’s Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background (CMB) discussed Planck’s first cosmological results, including some surprising news. For one thing, the universe is 13.82 billion years old, a hundred million years older than previously thought, [...]

The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) brings together universities, observatories, and one national laboratory to hunt for supernovae and other astronomical objects. At the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Berkeley Lab processes and stores the data from PTF’s surveys, which use the Oschin Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory.
On August 25, 2010, PTF’s “autonomous machine-learning [...]

Through UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has made a $2.1 million grant to Berkeley Lab’s BigBOSS project. The grant funds the development of key technologies for modifying the 4-meter Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak and constructing a precision instrument to study dark energy by mapping tens of millions of galaxies and quasars over the entire Northern Hemisphere sky.

Mounted on a telescope high in the Andes, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) saw first light September 12. DECam’s half-billion-pixel focal plane is made of Berkeley Lab CCDs, descended from sensors developed for high-energy physics by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers. Highly sensitive to the near-infrared region of the spectrum, Berkeley Lab CCDs are an essential component of the most powerful dark-energy survey instrument yet made.

The multi-institutional Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) team presents the first-ever direct observations of a Type 1a supernova progenitor system. Astronomers have collected evidence indicating that the progenitor system of a Type 1a supernova, called PTF 11kx, contains a red giant star. They also show that the system previously underwent at least one much smaller nova eruption before it ended its life in a destructive supernova.

First spectroscopic results from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, give the most detailed look yet at the time when dark energy turned on. Over six billion light years distant, halfway back to the big bang, the expanding universe slipped from the grasp of matter’s mutual gravitational attraction. Dark energy took over, and expansion began to accelerate. BOSS is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey, led by scientists from Berkeley Lab.

Even as the “supernova of a generation” came into view in backyards across the northern hemisphere last August, physicists and astronomers who had caught its earliest moments were developing a surprising and much clearer picture of what happens during a titanic Type Ia explosion. Now they have announced the closest, most detailed look ever at one of the universe’s brightest “standard candles,” the celestial mileposts that led to the discovery of dark energy.

Susan Murabana is working to bring astronomy education to Africa through Global Hands-On Universe, a program founded by Berkeley Lab astronomer Carl Pennypacker.

On May 3, 2011, the 100th birthday of renowned physicist Luis Alvarez, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize for his work in particle physics at the Bevatron and known worldwide for his codiscovery that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid, was celebrated by the American Physical Society’s Forum on the History of Physics with invited reminiscences from three physicists who worked with him closely during his career at Berkeley Lab: Richard Muller, Moishe Pripstein, and Arthur Rosenfeld.

The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, showing the distribution of intergalactic clouds of gas by using light from 14,000 galaxy-eating black holes over 10 billion light years away, has been announced by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), the largest survey in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The result proves that the technique, never attempted before, can be used to study dark energy in the early universe.