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 [...]

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 [...]