Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — The National Research Council’s Beyond Einstein Program Assessment Committee has recommended that the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), jointly supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, be the first of NASA’s Beyond Einstein cosmology missions to be developed and launched.

SNAP, the [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

NASA’s Stardust mission was the first to bring back pristine samples of a comet and the first to return dust particles directly from interplanetary space. It would not have been surprising if these materials had given evidence of a shared origin — a very cold one at that.

On its encounter with [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — The 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize has been awarded jointly to Saul Perlmutter of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley, Brian Schmidt of the Australian National University, and members of the two international teams that these researchers led in [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

Hawaii, February 21, 2007, 3:30 in the morning: Nao Suzuki and Rahman Amanullah, two Berkeley Lab astrophysics postdocs, are chasing supernovae with one of the twin Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea. In the telescope’s control room an observing assistant (OA) stands by to help — partly by occasionally dashing [...]

A new community lecture series featuring four of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s most distinguished scientists will debut on Monday, March 5, with 2006 Nobel Laureate George Smoot. All lectures, free and open to the public, will be held in the Berkeley Repertory Theatre – hence the series name “Science at the Theatre.”
The talks begin [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

At less than half the cost of a single round trip in the space shuttle, NASA’s $200-million, seven-year-long Stardust mission to comet Wild 2 was an economical excursion into space. Yet Stardust scored a remarkable number of firsts:

Stardust returned the first solid samples from space since the 1970s moon missions;
These were [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA —George Smoot of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been awarded the Daniel Chalonge Medal by the International School of Astrophysics “Daniel Chalonge,” known as the Chalonge School. The handsome bronze medal was awarded “for George Smoot’s 15-year support and outstanding contributions to the Chalonge School.” The school offers [...]

Scientific contact: Peter Nugent, (510) 486-6492, penugent@lbl.gov
Media contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — A group of scientists affiliated with the SuperNova Legacy Survey (SNLS) have found startling evidence that there is more than one kind of Type Ia supernova, a class of exploding stars which until now has been regarded as [...]

Contact: Paul Preuss, (510) 486-6249, paul_preuss@lbl.gov

BERKELEY, CA — John Mather, Project Scientist of NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer satellite mission, and eighteen members of COBE’s Science Working Group, including George Smoot of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have jointly received the 2006 Gruber Cosmology Prize for their ground-breaking studies of the cosmic microwave [...]