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Tag: Department of Physics and Astronomy

UA Professors Help in Discovery of Potential Cosmic Ray Source

In this artistic rendering, a powerful blazar is shown as the origin of a neutrino detected by IceCube. The Fermi observatory in space and MAGIC telescopes on Earth detected high-energy gamma rays from the same source.

From the September 2018 Desktop News | Three UA professors are part of an international team of scientists who found evidence of the source of tiny cosmic particles, known as neutrinos, a discovery that opens the door to using these particles to observe the universe. “We’re beginning to do astronomy using means other than light, combining electromagnetic (light) observations with other measurements in what we now call multimessenger astronomy,” said Dr. Marcos Santander, UA assistant professor of physics and astronomy. “This […]

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With Project, Physics Professor ‘Pushing the Limit of Our Understanding’

Dr. Wang-Kong Tse was recently awarded a grant for his research examining van der Waals materials.

From the September 2018 Desktop News | Dr. Wang-Kong Tse, UA assistant professor of physics, was recently awarded a grant from the 2018 Early Career Research Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, one of 84 scientists from across the nation to receive funding. Tse will lead theoretical work in examining van der Waals materials, stacked, two-dimensional materials, when placed in what is called a non-equilibrium state, a condition where the material’s resting state is being perturbed by an external […]

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UA Astronomer Helps Discover Elusive Black Hole

A NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope view of galaxy 6dFGS gJ215022.2-055059 – the large white-yellow blob at the center of the image – and neighboring galaxies, combined with X-ray observations of a black hole at the galaxy’s outskirts – the small white-purple dot to its lower left – obtained with NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory.

From the August 2018 Desktop News | An astronomer at UA is part of an international team of researchers who found a mid-sized black hole, a cosmic oddity in observations of the universe. The finding, which demonstrates an effective method to detect this class of black holes, was announced recently in the journal Nature Astronomy. Two types of black holes are well-known. Massive stars create stellar-mass black holes when they die, while galaxies host supermassive black holes at their centers, with masses equivalent […]

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UA Book Helps Solve 87-Year-Old Fossil Mystery

From the March 2018 Desktop News | In the world of paleontology, mysteries abound. Apart from questions about their makers, fossils sometimes create their own mysteries after they are collected. The 2016 University of Alabama Press book, Footprints in Stone: Fossil Traces of Coal-Age Tetrapods, recently helped solve a mystery at the American Museum of Natural History, AMNH, in New York City. The book was co-written by Dr.  Ronald J. Buta, UA professor of astronomy, and Dr. David C. Kopaska-Merkel, section chief […]

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Solving Galactic Mysteries a Few Minutes at a Time

William Keel

  From the February 2018 Desktop News | A project led by an astronomer at The University of Alabama will use 12-25 minute gaps in the regular imaging schedule of the Hubble Space Telescope to get a better look at oddities found in the sky. Dr. William C. Keel, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, led an effort to use Hubble to investigate unusual objects found by volunteer astronomers in a crowd-sourced astronomy project, Galaxy Zoo, and its companion Radio Galaxy […]

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