Studying Einstein’s General Relativity theory and such celestial phenomena as black holes and strange attractors in a laboratory setting may soon be possible using the new breed of artificial optical materials that can bend light in unusual ways.

Finding rare and fleeting cosmic events not only requires the right kind of telescope and camera, it depends on high-performance computing that can pinpoint objects of interest among thousands of sky images while there’s still time for follow-up observations. Caltech and DOE’s NERSC join forces in just such a search, the Palomar Transient Factory.

The Nearby Supernova Factory has discovered an efficient method for standardizing the intrinsic brightness and thus the distance to the cosmic milestones known as Type Ia supernovae. The discovery underlines the crucial importance of spectroscopy in the quest to understand dark energy.

Berkeley Lab’s interest in the Planck mission to map the cosmic microwave background goes back to a proposal that evolved into the present design – and extends into the future as NERSC’s powerful computers stand by to analyze the coming flood of data.

Until the fall of 2008, the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) was a competition among satellite proposals named SNAP, DESTINY, and ADEPT. Now all will be combined in a spacecraft built by NASA, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE’s JDEM Project Office is headquartered at Berkeley Lab.

From COBE to Planck and beyond, the volume of data from measurements of the cosmic microwave background continues to grow by orders of magnitude. The Computational Cosmology Center, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Computational Research Division, has algorithms and implementations in the works so NERSC’s supercomputers can handle the rising tide.

Humans have been star-gazing for thousands of years but the surprises keep coming. Berkeley Lab astrophysicists observed a mysterious object that grew increasingly bright for about 100 days then faded away to nothing over the next 100 days. Astronomers have never reported anything like it before and still don’t know what it was.