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.

Excerpts from a review of Richard Panek’s “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality,” published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 10: in relating the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, the author shows how physicists and astronomers at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley not only contributed to the study of dark matter but pioneered the techniques that revealed the existence of dark energy. Berkeley Lab scientists remain at the forefront of research into the nature of the dark universe.

The largest image of the sky yet made – more than a trillion pixels – has been released by the multi-institutional third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) at a press conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. The largest component of SDSS-III is the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, BOSS, led by Berkeley Lab scientists, now engaged in producing an even larger map of the sky.

IceCube, the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector, is now complete. The giant neutrino telescope, buried a mile and a half deep in the Antarctic ice, now has its complete array of 86 strings carrying over 5,000 photodetectors, deployed to search for signs of neutrinos passing through the clear polar ice. The electronics and packaging of the photodetectors, called Digital Optical Modules, were conceived, designed, and tested by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers.

Members of the Nearby Supernova Factory based at Berkeley Lab discovered and analyzed a rare Type Ia supernova whose progenitor star had a mass some two and a half times that of our sun – much more mass than a Type Ia progenitor should be able to accumulate before it explodes. The data they gathered is the most complete ever for such an unusual beast; only one model really fits, the merger of two white dwarf stars.

In an attempt to explain away invisible dark matter and dark energy, some theorists have offered new theories of gravity that try to improve on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. A new study inspired by the work of a Berkeley Lab cosmologist indicates that at least one of these new theories is wrong.

An international panel of experts has ruled in favor of the theory proposed in 1980 by the late Berkeley Lab physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter, a UC Berkeley geologist, that a large asteroid struck the earth 65 million years ago, triggering the extinction of the dinosaurs.