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Tag: Astrophysics & Cosmology

How to Escape a Black Hole: Simulations Provide New Clues to What’s Driving Powerful Plasma Jets

Image - This visualization of a general-relativistic collisionless plasma simulation shows the density of positrons near the event horizon of a rotating black hole. Plasma instabilities produce island-like structures in the region of intense electric current. (Credit: Kyle Parfrey et al./Berkeley Lab)

Scientists Team Up With Industry to Mass-Produce Detectors for Next-Gen Cosmic Experiment

Photo - Existing instrumentation at the Atacama Desert site where some of the CMB-S4 telecopes will be built. CMB-S4 will also include telescopes at the South Pole. (Photo courtesy of Aritoki Suzuki/Berkeley Lab)

Massive New Dark Matter Detector Gets Its ‘Eyes’

Photo - Researchers at Brown University assemble an array of photomultiplier tubes for the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter search experiment. The first of two sets of the photomultiplier arrays arrived Friday at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota. (Credit: Nick Dentamaro/Brown University)

VIDEO: 5,000 Robots Merge to Map the Universe in 3D

Image - This three-minute video describes the focal plane, a key component for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. The focal plane will be equipped with 5,000 swiveling robots that are designed to point at pre-selected galaxies and gather their light. The measurements will be used to build the largest 3D map of the universe. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab)

Scientists Present New Clues to Cut Through the Mystery of Titan’s Atmospheric Haze

Image - The atmospheric haze of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (pictured here along Saturn’s midsection), is captured in this natural-color image (box at left). A new study, which involved X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source, has revealed new clues that may help to unravel the formation of this haze. (Credits: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Space Science Institute, Caltech)

A Quantum Leap Toward Expanding the Search for Dark Matter

Image - A visualization of a massive galaxy cluster that shows dark matter density (purple filaments) overlaid with the gas velocity field. (Credit: Illustris Collaboration)

A Supercool Component for a Next-Generation Dark Matter Experiment

Photo - A worker inspects the titanium cryostat for the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment in a clean room. (Credit: STFC)

Q&A: Berkeley Lab’s Spencer Klein Talks About IceCube Then and Now, and What’s Next

Photo - Spencer Klein at the geographic South Pole in 2006. (Photo courtesy of Spencer Klein/Berkeley Lab)

From Moon Rocks to Space Dust: Berkeley Lab's Extraterrestrial Research

Photo - A blue crystal recovered from a meteorite that fell near Morocco in 1998. The scale bar represents 200 microns (millionths of a meter). Such crystals, which have been studied at Berkeley Lab, have been found to contain liquid water and complex organic compounds. (Credit: Queenie Chan/The Open University, U.K.)

Experiments at Berkeley Lab Help Trace Interstellar Dust Back to Solar System’s Formation

Image - An elemental map of tiny glassy grains (blue with green specks) inside a cometary-type interplanetary dust particle. Carbonaceous material (red) holds these objects together. This image was collected from a thin section of the particle using a scanning transmission electron microscope. (Credit: Hope Ishii/University of Hawaii at Manoa, reproduced with permission from PNAS)

Berkeley Lab’s Julian Borrill Elected Co-Spokesperson of Next-Gen Cosmic Microwave Background Experiment

Photo - Julian Borrill in Chile's Atacama Desert with the POLABEAR and ACT telescopes in the background. (Photo courtesy of Julian Borrill/Berkeley Lab)

Tiny Distortions in Universe’s Oldest Light Reveal Clearer Picture of Strands in Cosmic Web

Illustration - In this illustration, the trajectory of cosmic microwave background light is bent by structures known as filaments that are invisible to our eyes, creating an effect known as weak lensing captured by the Planck satellite (left), a space observatory. Researchers used computers to study the weak lensing signals and produce a map of these filaments, which typically span hundreds of light years in length. (Credit: Siyu He, Shadab Alam, Wei Chen, and Planck/ESA)