It takes special software to map the universe from noisy data. A Berkeley Lab code called MADmap does just that for the cosmic microwave background and has now been adapted by scientists probing the sky with the PACS camera aboard the Herschel satellite to make spectacular images of the infrared universe.

What if the light waves emitted by exploding stars could be translated into sound? That’s the idea behind a musical project to “sonify” the universe by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart that caught the attention of Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist George Smoot.

Berkeley Lab cosmologists were part of an international team that has extended the relationship between the x-ray luminosity and the mass of galaxy clusters as measured by gravitational lensing, improving the reliability of mass measurements of much older, more distant, and smaller galactic structures. These refined measurements will benefit both the understanding of dark matter and the nature of dark energy as well.

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.