Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole’s newly published biography of the “uncle of the atom bomb,” as Frank Oppenheimer called himself, recounts the touching and sometimes tortuous relationship between Frank, Ernest Lawrence, and other physicists as they struggled to find a way to survive a nuclear age. Oppenheimer’s solution was to found an extraordinary science museum, the Exploratorium.

George Smoot of the Physics Division represented Berkeley Lab at the signing of an agreement with representatives of South Korea’s University of Incheon to explore the potential for joint scientific research in energy, biology, accelerators, cosmology, and space. The agreement calls for investigation of possible collaborations in which the University of Incheon would provide facilities and Berkeley Lab would provide research programs.

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.

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.

One of the most crucial components of the new program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and its 2.5 meter, wide-field telescope in New Mexico is a unique kind of dark-energy probe called BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, led by Berkeley Lab physicists.

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the discovery of dark energy, Science@Berkeley Lab presents a capsule history, in two parts, of the Supernova Cosmology Project’s pioneering efforts to measure the expansion rate of the universe using Type Ia supernovae as standard candles. A subsequent issue will look at new proposals for studying [...]